Execution Plan
Second ingenious thriller with a black edge from the author of Seeing the WiresMick lives in Dudley. As if that wasn’t enough of a disadvantage for one man, he’s also a true nerd. He grew up in the seventies hanging around video game arcades and got a degree in computer science from Borth University, Wales. Now he writes code for a living. For fun he watches his best friend, Dermot, trying (and failing) to tip the bar staff in the Slipped Disc.Mick has a slightly odd phobia. He can’t look at a mirror. His problem has its origins in a psychology experiment he took part in back in college. But recently, he’s been starting to wonder if the experiment might have had a few more sinister side-effects. For example, the way he keeps hallucinating video game characters trying to kill him…It’s time Mick found out what’s going on inside his own brain. Before whatever’s in there gets out for good.
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Copyright © Patrick Thompson 2003
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Source ISBN: 9780007105236
Ebook Edition © MARCH 2016 ISBN: 9780007571765 Version: 2016-03-15
Contents
For Mum & Dad
Where do I start? Things don’t have convenient beginnings, things overlap and collide.
Perhaps it started like this:
Veronica was on her way home, carrying bags of shopping. She was travelling by bus because we are back in the days when families had only one car, if they had one at all. She’d got bags of vegetables and foodstuffs we’d fail to recognize now. She was going to have to make them into something, not just empty one packet or another into the microwave. Microwaves aren’t even a rumour. Microwaves are still science fiction. We are back in the early seventies.
The bus was crowded, and people jostled. The young people didn’t hand over their seats to young women with heavy bags anymore. Everyone was smoking.
She’d left her son at home, but he’d be fine. He was old enough to look after himself. His father would be at work until six, and then doing office work at home until midnight. She’d be cooking for the three of them.
That was how it was, and it wasn’t likely to change. Germaine Greer might not think so, but Germaine Greer wasn’t living on housekeeping in the West Midlands. It was easier to be radical when you had enough money to give up the day job. It was no trouble to be a free thinker if you had nothing urgent to think about.
Sometimes she wished she’d taken after her mother, who had been in charge of her own household. The understanding had been that her father had been there to bring in money. He was subservient to the female line. They’d been emancipated before emancipation.
She hadn’t, though, and that was all there was to it. There was too much about her mother that was too uncomfortable.
If there was a genetic component to that – which seemed unlikely, as her mother’s brand of strangeness was unscientific and didn’t sit easily with concepts like genetics – then it might have passed, via her, to her son.
Perhaps it had. Perhaps he’d have abilities of his own. If he had, she hoped they wouldn’t hurt him. He didn’t need hurting. It’d happen, of course. Life was like that. Damage got done. The innocent came off badly. He’d get damaged.
Knowing that, she tried to prepare him. He wanted a pet. They’d talked about it.
‘We can’t have anything,’ she’d told him. ‘We haven’t the money for it.’
‘I could get a paper round.’
‘For how much? A few pence? A couple of shillings? We haven’t the room for a dog.’
‘We could have a cat.’
‘There are too many roads around here,’ she’d said, shivering. A cat would never survive.
‘A mouse then. In a cage.’
She didn’t want mice, or rats, or anything else. Animals cost money. You had to feed them, and clean up after them, and he’d lose interest in it and then it’d be something else she got lumbered with. When the holidays were over and he was back at school he’d forget about it.
The bus driver was in a good mood and stopped short of the stop so that she wouldn’t have so far to walk. She thanked him and heaved her bags out into the afternoon air. It was winter, and the air was becoming colourless and frigid. In some houses the Christmas decorations were up. She thought it was too early for that. It was still three weeks until Christmas; too early even to think about it. She wondered what he’d want this year. Everything, probably, and a cat thrown in too.
You couldn’t have everything. Not even her mother had everything. Visiting her now, in her dusty old house with the cobwebs clustered wherever she could no longer reach, that was clear. You couldn’t have everything. Her father had died, worn out looking after her mother, and her mother lived on in a house she could no longer keep clean. The neighbour’s cats popped in for food and a chat. In her mother’s trade – if it was a trade – cats were a given. When she dragged her son to visit his grandmother he’d be half afraid, half annoyed. Her husband would not go at all.
