Читать книгу Execution Plan - Patrick Thompson - Страница 18

Although I had been at the college for almost three years, I had never been to the third floor until I turned up to earn my quick hundred quid. I had thought about it, and had decided that it couldn’t do any harm. I was surprised to see that the stairs continued on up past the third floor, through a locked grille. Presumably they led to an attic or loft. The doors were numbered. I was after 304. It was eleven in the morning and there didn’t seem to be anyone around. Didn’t they have psychologists in Wales? With all of that research material going free? That seemed a terrible waste.

‘I didn’t think you’d turn up,’ said Tina, trundling round the corner with an armful of brown folders.

‘I’m getting paid for this. We are still getting paid, aren’t we?’

‘We are. Don’t worry about the money. Now, lets see if he’s in.’

She knocked on the door. On the lower floors, the doors had glass panels at head height. Even the door of the server room had one. Up here in the realms of the headshrinkers, the doors were of flimsy but unbroken wood and painted a matte white. She knocked again.

‘Come on in,’ said someone. Tina opened the door and bundled me in.

‘This is him,’ she said, meaning me.

‘Ah,’ said the man in the room. He was a young man, probably no older than twenty, and he was wearing a lab coat. He looked like he might be related or married (or both, this was Borth) to one of the computer technicians from the ground floor.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ he said in a nervous voice. He gave me a limp, sweaty handshake. It didn’t seem like the sort of contact he was used to. There was a good chance that he wasn’t used to any at all. He had the sort of sparse ginger hair that shows a lot of scalp without the need for total baldness. His eyebrows were invisible unless he stood at the right angle in strong light. His eyes were a watery blue and he did his best to keep them from looking directly at you. When he spoke, he sounded as though he might stutter. He never did, but there was the feeling that he might. He was always fidgeting with the skin around his fingernails, and from time to time he’d absently bite off a stray strip. To do this he’d bend an arm across his face, turning his hand to the necessary angle for auto-cannibalism.

The top of a black tee-shirt was visible in the V-shaped opening at the throat of his lab coat. There was no writing on it.

‘I’m Betts,’ he said, letting go of my hand with evident relief. ‘I’m the technician. The lab technician, I mean. I’ll run you through what we’re about, then Dr Morrison will run through the experiment. It won’t take long. ‘I’ll give you some background first. If that’s alright?’

We said that it was.

He told us about some tricks you could do with mirrors.