I threw the switch. It was out of Wallace Ogilvie’s view but he would soon know that I had done it.
I stood, watched and waited. My eyes were on his, his on me. I wanted to see the reaction, the first sign of realization. I wanted to see him twitch.
Ten minutes and nothing. Maybe the unit had lain idle too long. I began to wonder if it was working properly.
Fifteen minutes and I was sure it wasn’t operational. I began to wonder if I could fix it. I’d no idea where to start. It would be terrible. It was all going wrong.
Then he twitched. It was just a shake of a shoulder. A single shiver. It was enough.
A surge of exhilaration and anticipation ran through me. He shivered with cold and I shivered with excitement.
I spoke to the glass in front of me. I spoke to him knowing that he probably couldn’t hear.
‘The normal body temperature of an adult human is 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Your core temperature is already less. But I guess you know that by now.
‘Feel that tightening across your shoulders and neck? That’s known as pre-shivering muscle tone. It means your body temperature has hit 97 degrees.’
He began to move more. His legs shook against their bindings, his shoulders trembled, hunched and flexed. He was rubbing himself against the chair, the little that the ties would allow. His feet were shaking and kicking as best they could. His head swaying side to side.
‘Colder now,’ I told him. ‘Perhaps 96 degrees. Your body is shivering so that you generate heat by increasing the chemical reactions required for muscle activity. Amazing but that can actually increase surface heat production by 500 per cent.
‘The bad news is that you can only keep that going for so long because your muscle glucose gets depleted and fatigue kicks in.’
He was shivering so much now that the chair was dancing, shuffling an inch here and there as he did anything he could to get warmer. It was hopeless though.
‘Your hands are especially cold, aren’t they? Your palms will be no more than 60 degrees. Painfully cold. That’s because your body is instinctively sending blood coursing away from your skin, deeper inside you. It is deliberately letting your hands chill to keep the vital organs warm. It won’t be enough though.’
Now he was really shaking, trembling violently. It was almost as if he was having a fit.
‘Your body temperature has dropped to 95 degrees. You have hit mild hypothermia and your body is undergoing its maximum shivering stage. It is contracting your muscles to generate more heat. Don’t worry. It won’t last long.’
I waited and watched and waited some more.
The shivering was violent and broken by pauses. Then the pauses got longer and the shivering shorter.
Before long he had stopped all attempts at movement, no real efforts to move his legs. All he did was shiver. Then eventually, as I knew it would, the shivering stopped too.
‘Oh dear. Heat is draining away fast now. Half of it is disappearing through your head alone. Your ears must be so excruciatingly cold. You are below 95 degrees now. That’s bad. Every one degree drop below 95 means that your cerebral metabolic rate falls off by five per cent. You are losing it. When your body temperature hits 93 degrees then amnesia will start to prey on you. Pity that, I don’t want you to forget anything. Not just yet.’
He just sat slumped in front of me now, occasionally raising his head to look at me with a half-hearted glare. It was the best he could manage. His skin was turning blue. His pupils were dilated.
‘You’re in profound hypothermia now. Your temperature has fallen to 88 degrees and your body can’t be bothered trying to keep itself warm any more. Your blood is thickening. Feel it? Your oxygen intake has fallen by over a quarter. Your kidneys are working overtime. If you hadn’t already pished yourself then you would probably do it anyway. Your body is giving up the ghost.
‘In case you are wondering, and you probably are, there is no specifically defined temperature at which the body perishes from extreme cold. Nazi doctors, those sick bastards that experimented with cold-water immersion baths at Dachau, calculated death at around 77 Fahrenheit. Sometimes it’s lower, sometimes higher.
‘Chilling, isn’t it?’
His chest was heaving. His breathing was severely troubled.
I watched him intently.
‘You will now be about 88 degrees and your heart is in overdrive. Chilled nerve tissues are blocking the heart’s electrical impulses. It is becoming arrhythmic, pumping less than two thirds of the normal amount of blood. There’s less oxygen, your brain is slowing. You might be suffering hallucinations.
‘It’s going to get worse. Two degrees lower and you are going to feel really weird. It’s the strange bit. You are going to feel hot. Really hot. It’s at this stage that people freezing to death feel so hot that they start ripping their clothes off. Sadly that’s not an option open to you. You will just have to suffer.
‘No one really knows why but they think it’s because constricted blood vessels suddenly open and create a sensation of extreme heat against the skin. It will feel like you are burning up.
‘Your body is shutting down. It doesn’t want to play any more. That’s happening now. You are drifting away. Gone. Bye, bye.
‘You’re not dead though. They call it a metabolic icebox. You’re not blue any more, you’ve gone grey. If I looked I might not find a pulse or detect breathing. But you’re not dead. Not yet.
‘If, like the Nazis, I let your temperature plunge further then you would have a pulmonary oedema. There would be cardiac and respiratory failure. That would be fine except that I wouldn’t know when. You would be fucking dead and I wouldn’t know when. And I want to know when. I want to know the exact point of your fucking death. I want to know to the second. You remember that cardiac arrhythmia that you are having? It is very dangerous. Any sudden shock is likely to set off ventricular fibrillation and result in certain death. You need to watch that.’
I opened the door to the freezer room and walked quietly up to Wallace Ogilvie. Oh it was cold, very cold. But I wouldn’t be long.
I stood next to him. His head slumped. His body showing no sign of life.
I leaned into him. Put my mouth close to his ear.
And I screamed. I roared. I fucking bellowed my hate into his ear. I thought my lungs might burst with the effort.
His heart jumped once. Just once and I knew it was done.
I left the room, shivering through more than cold, closing the door behind me. I pulled the switch back to off, shutting down the freezing process, and slumped with my back against the wall. I slid to the floor, crying my eyes out.
I would cry until near morning, until Wallace Ogilvie was warmed just enough that I could saw off the little finger of his right hand and take his body elsewhere. Somewhere it could be found.
‘
La vengeance est un plat qui se mange froid
.’
I said it out loud although no one was listening.
Memories are like landmines. You never know which one will blow up in your face. You can be mugged by your memories when you least expect it. I was shaving one time, drawing the blade across my cheek when a memory leapt into my head.
Menorca. 1996. The image of Sarah at a restaurant table with the biggest ice cream you’ve ever seen matched only by the size of the grin on her face. She thought she was the luckiest girl in the world. She was wearing a bright yellow T-shirt with a vivid orange sunburst on it, her blonde hair pulled behind her in a ponytail. A sliver of ice cream slipped from her mouth and trickled down her chin. She laughed till she nearly wet herself. All three of us laughed so much that people turned to look at us.
I remembered that and stared at myself in the mirror. I had the sudden urge to gouge my face with the razor. To bite it deep into my cheek and twist it till it tore a chunk of skin and cheek. I stood and stared at myself as my hand and my mind battled over the grip of the razor.
I didn’t do it.
I did try not to let it linger but sometimes the thought would slip under my guard. To meet up with her again. Not to wait. To make it happen. To catch her up before the smell of her left me. Before I couldn’t conjure up her face in an instant.
Movies portray sudden flashbacks of memory with bursts of light and images exploding in your head. I used to think that was just bollocks but it is precisely how it happens. For me at any rate.
You can be driving, talking, walking, in mid sentence or mid bite when you are jumped by your past. The memories are always there, lurking, waiting.
Sometimes I had to shake my head to stop them, to clear them out of my mind. Then there was guilt at doing that. For not enduring them. For not putting up with the pain of the memories the way a proper father would.
I’d hear her voice too. Not voices like killers heard, nothing crazy. Just her voice, finishing sentences for me and sometimes telling me what I should or shouldn’t be doing. Her being silly or laughing or saying how she loved this film or that food. I’d find myself nodding and saying, ‘I know. I know, sweetheart.’
Guilt came at you just as often as memories did. Just as random, just as unexpected, just as deadly. Guilt at what you had done and what you hadn’t. Guilt for breaking the biggest promise of all. The one that every father makes to their child. To look after them. To protect them. No matter what.
Sometimes I lay awake wondering what I wouldn’t do to have her back. To have her back for good or for five minutes. To have her back in the world even if she wasn’t with us. To have her laughing and running. Growing, working, playing. Smiling or crying. Happy or sad. Good times and bad. Just to have her back.
The answer was anything. Anything and more.
Kill? Obviously so. The question was how many and I didn’t have an answer that didn’t scare me.
The darkness of the night and the blackness of my soul were strange and dangerous places to consider such things. Maybe that was when I descended into insanity but more likely it was desperation. I would try anything, do anything, think anything, hope for anything.
In the early days, the black, black days, I would hold my breath. I’d convince myself that if I closed my eyes and didn’t breathe for a full minute then when I opened them again it would be back to the time when everything was alright. It never worked but I’d try it again and again. I’d screw my eyes so tight it would hurt but it would never work.
I’d make mental pacts. If I did this or that then time would turn.
I’d give up everything I owned. That was easy. Every penny I had or would ever have. My house, my health. I’d give my life, of course I would.
I tried to wish myself dead. I tried to make deals with the God I didn’t believe in. With any God, with any Devil. I’d scream within myself, demanding that someone listened. Take me. Bring her back.
The things I’d promise would get darker and worse. They had to because the first lot didn’t change anything.
If giving up my life wouldn’t do it then I’d offer up the lives of others. If wishing someone dead would change things then I’d wish it. Instantly.
One person. Two. Ten. A village. A city. A country.
There wasn’t a limit. How could there be? What kind of father could draw a line and say I’d do this or that for my daughter but no more? There is nothing that a father wouldn’t do.
I’d imagine a tsunami was summoned up by the God that I didn’t recognize and was about to flood the entire eastern seaboard of the United States. The God would say to me that I could halt it with a single word and save the lives of millions. Or I could have five minutes with the girl that was taken away from me. No contest.
In the middle of the night it is easy to wish away the lives of millions of people. You close your eyes as tight as you can and condemn them to death and hope beyond hope that when you open them again everything will be alright. But no matter how many you kill with your mind it is always the same.
You begin to wonder if one actual death would do more than millions of pretend ones. Maybe if it was the middle of the day rather than the depths of night then you’d dismiss the idea. Maybe if you weren’t driven to distraction by the unbearable awfulness of being alive. Maybe if you weren’t me.
Otherwise you grab at any straw, any hope, any chance. You know, of course, that it won’t change things. Time cannot turn. You are not stupid, you know that. Yet you try, you have no choice, your mind demands it.
One death. It’s not much. Not for a life. Not for her life. A bargain.
Then you may wonder about more than one killing. You may wonder about how much revenge would be worth in a pact with the God or the Devil. You offer up the lives of others and you promise retribution. Surely either would do. Both would be a guarantee.
It becomes an easy decision to make. You promise to do something that suddenly seems easy and right in return for the one thing that you want above all else. Who wouldn’t do that for the person that means more to them than any other? Not you. Not me. Definitely not me.
What sort of father wouldn’t do anything for his daughter?
Same anonymous envelope, same procedure. Once the police found Wallace Ogilvie’s body then they’d be expecting it. There would be an expectant queue at Rachel Narey’s desk awaiting the post.