Identity X by Michelle Muckley Page A

inexplicable after effects.  It just wasn’t
possible.
    Could
they have drugged me?
    He
trawled through his brain, trying to remember all the people he had come into
contact with that Wednesday.  He had spent the day at the lab, he had drunk the
Champagne from the flimsy plastic cups, but he had bought that himself and he
had opened it himself.  He had watched Phil pour a measure into each of the
other cups before he had got his own share, and he remembered it being less in
his cup than any of the others.  Then I went straight to the bar.  It
was only after searching this possibility that he realised how crazy he had
already started to sound.  Who the hell were ‘they’ anyway?
    The
bar? Could somebody have drugged me at the bar?
    As he
entered the quiet side streets Ben became acutely aware of every movement and
every person around him.  He called Hannah three times, but the calls didn’t
connect.  The side streets were filled with small cafes and little shops, the
kind that Hannah always liked to nose around in when they had taken trips to
the coastal villages in the early days of their marriage and before the
research had taken over their lives.  He realised that without any conscious
thought he was following Ami’s advice and staying reasonably out of sight.  Her
other instruction, don’t trust anybody, had positioned itself
uncomfortably at the forefront of his mind.  She hadn’t even requested that he
extend any trust to her.  She virtually begged him to meet her and then told him
not to trust anybody.  She knew his wife’s name.  I definitely never told
her about Hannah .
    He
knew this because Mark had been right.  Ami did have feelings for him, and he
knew it.  He could see it in every single thing that she did in the
laboratory.  When he was discussing results with Phil, he would see her staring
through the glass partition watching him.  Watching his lips as they handled
each word.  She would tap her beautiful and elegant hands against the glass of
his office door, hands that seemed to never be inflicted with a scratch or
blemish, and she would float through like a heavenly seraphim with an
inextinguishable light illuminating his dark cave.  She would offer coffee or
to collect his pastrami sandwich from the shop below.  She would ask for help
with procedures that he knew she understood as well as he did.  They would sit
in the area at the top of the stairs together as she listened whilst he spoke
passionately about his dedication to his research, kicking off her shoes to
tuck her feet up underneath her legs to listen when there was nobody else
there.  He had courted her attentions and had given her every reason to believe
that her flirtations were far from foolish.  He had allowed her to massage his
ego.  He had encouraged her advances for his own benefit.  She was a slave to
his needs, a carer who tended to him, offering attention in ways that he had
forgotten that he needed.  By asking for nothing, she gave him everything and
made him feel like a king.  She didn’t argue her point.  She accepted.  She
didn’t demand his time.  She offered.  She would never have purchased
compulsory celebratory champagne, and would have left him with his beer to
enjoy.  He had told Mark that his work came first, and it did, but he knew that
at least on a handful of occasions the results from the day had reached a
conclusion and yet he had still found himself sat in the office with Ami long
after everybody else had returned to their lives at home.  He had never
dismissed her then.  Was it so easy to dismiss her now?
    Ben
had decided not to approach the mall from the main entrance.  He knew there was
a side entrance and that it led directly to the lifts where he would be able to
approach the first floor without being seen in the corridors.  Even though
nobody but Mark knew he was coming here he had to be careful.  He slipped in
quietly where the side corridor was virtually empty, the