Mindgame by Anthony Horowitz Page A

wall. On the other side, a door opens onto a corridor.
    Another picture in the room shows a sweet-looking dog on one side. There is a mirror opposite. A second door, next to a medical screen, leads into a reception room. There are plenty of books in the room. On the top of one low shelf stands a vase of sunflowers and an empty bottle of red wine. There’s a rug on the floor, a couple of armchairs, a plastic wastepaper bin and a wood-steel office chair. Incongruously, a complete human skeleton stands on a frame in one corner.
    All this will change…
    As the action continues, the scenery will play a game with the audience… parts of it changing while their attention is elsewhere. The aim is to suggest a shifting, faulty perception, a feeling that you cannot trust your eyes. I have not indicated in the text where these changes should take place…it should become evident in the direction. When the audience’s attention is on one part of the stage, changes can be made on the other: the simple misdirection of any sleight-of-hand.
    The portrait of Ennis will slowly transform (one feature at a time?) into a portrait of a woman we will come to know as Jane Plimpton. The dog will become a hideous wolf. The mirror will become a second window, this one barred. The low wall outside the window will rise, brick by brick, until it completely obscures the view. The office furniture(telephone, lamps etc.) will become modern and utilitarian. The sunflowers will grow.
    Each time the two doors are opened, they will be found to lead somewhere slightly different. These changes can actually be made while the action continues. During the interval, the curtains, wallpaper and rug can all be changed: the patterns can be very similar but somehow distorted. The audience should be aware of the change but should be unable quite to define it.
    Sitting in the chair in front of the desk is MARK STYLER, a writer aged about fifty, casually dressed, a man with an air of self-confidence that borders on the smug. His face is pale and his haircut is a little odd…otherwise he’s the archetypal ‘expert’, the sort we’ve seen wheeled onto every BBC documentary late at night. He has a worn leather case by the chair.
    He’s been kept waiting. He looks at his watch for the twentieth time. He gets up, examines the room. The pictures. The skeleton. Looks at his watch again.
    A pause.
    He takes a tape recorder out of his case and switches it on. He moves across to the window and speaks into it.
    STYLER: Recording. Six fifteen, Thursday July the twenty-second.
    Pause.
    First impressions of Fairfields. Note to myself…why that name? The view from Dr Farquhar’s office. ( He pronounces it ‘Farker’ .) A nineteenth-century manor house set in its own extensive grounds in this secluded corner of Suffolk…if indeed that most ill-defined of English counties could be said to have corners. The wall that surrounds the place may be predictable but the attendant ivy and — I think — Japanese wisteria is surely not. As I drive up the perfectly manicured lawns with rockery to the right and lily pond to the left, it is only the click of the maximum security metaldoors automatically closing behind me that reminds me that I am not a guest at some exclusive Home Counties health resort but a writer, privileged to be invited into the country’s most notorious asylum for the criminally insane.
    Pause.
    Query why sick bastards locked up at the tax-payer’s expense should enjoy perfectly manicured lawns, rock gardens, et cetera. Nice thought about the Health Resort.
    Pause.
    Easterman is here somewhere. I have come to find him. I must find him. It is the end of a journey that has consumed my life and somehow I will persuade Dr Farquhar to help me. At long last the two of us will be face to face.
    STYLER considers what he has just said. He rewinds the tape part of the way and records again.
    What does the office of