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The
party was in full swing. Holly and mistletoe hung from every inch of the
Observation Lounge, and someone had set up a table covered with festive fare
against the wall. Rhapsody stood there. The other Angels had dragged her here
and all she really wanted to do was wait until they were distracted, (and given
the number of off duty Captains here, that shouldn’t take too long), and get out
of here. A
hand coiled around her waist, while a voice whispered in her ear. “If you will
stand under the mistletoe...” A
smell of alcohol and fruit ran down
her neck. Without thinking, without remembering that it all happened years ago
and there was no way it could be him, she jammed her elbow back.
“Oof.”
Crash,
the table collapsed, as everyone was suddenly looking at her. “Jesus, Caroline!” Captain Magenta said, cradling his abdomen as he got to his feet. “Can’t
you take a joke?” Rhapsody’s breathing was deep and panting as she gazed furiously at the
Italian. “Joke? Well, personally, I didn’t find it very funny, and I doubt that the
Spectrum Sexual Harassment Committee would agree with you!” “Oh, come on! It’s just a tradition; don’t you think you’re
over-reacting?” He was close, too close. She could still smell the Martini on his breath.
Without thinking, without even noticing the spectacle she was making of herself,
she turned around and fled. Unthinkingly, she ran past her quarters, past the lifts, past the mess
halls and the kitchen to the Standby Lounge. She sat down. Here she was safe. Even Lieutenant Green’s holiday spirit had been quelled at
decorating in here, and it wasn’t like anyone would think to look for her here. Unfortunately, she had reckoned without a Mysteron-free evening, as she
had not been in the room for five minutes,
when she suddenly heard the door sliding open. “Hey.” Poking her head over the top of the sofa, she saw Captain Scarlet entering
the room. “Paul, what are you doing here?” The dark-haired Englishman smiled. “Switched shifts with Grey. Destiny’s
with her folks.” He came and sat down on the sofa opposite her. “Thought you might like to
talk about what happened back there.” He glanced at her. “You O.K?” “I’m fine,” she said, automatically. “It’s just… I hate this!” There. It was at last out in the open. “I hate that stupid party and all the junk that accompanies it. They…” She
jerked her head towards the corridor, where the sounds of the party could be
heard. “…don’t know anything about it.” “And you do?” It was simply an enquiry. Rhapsody sighed. “Christmas isn’t just a
time for family, for parties, for food and drink. It’s a time when our
past...can be too close,” she finished, aware of how feeble it sounded.
“You sound like you’re talking about ghosts,” Scarlet said, attempting to turn
the situation into a joke. “Maybe I am,” she muttered softly. “A ghost made me what I am today.” At Scarlet’s questioning look, she began: “When I was a kid, I…” She
picked at the hem of her uniform jacket. “… I made some stupid decisions. A lot
of them involving alcohol.” She glanced up at his face, seeing the disbelief written there. “I know. I know. Miss Rhapsody Angel: the
frigid English woman. Won’t even drink fruit punch. It’s too close to the real
thing, and I know if I drink it, I’ll want something stronger and I can’t do
that, because I know what it does to me.” She sighed deeply. “I was nineteen, just finishing my first term of second year at University
and my parents were getting a divorce. In one sense, it was a relief - they
fought continuously. But it got tricky when my father got involved with one of
my friends.” She shivered at the memory. “I just stopped going home; I started
drinking and hanging around with a bad crowd...” She paused, as though uncertain about how far she should go, but decided
that as she’d come this far, it made more sense to finish her explanation. “We did a lot of stupid stuff,”
she admitted finally. “But we were just kids. Just stupid kids, doing stupid
stuff and we more than paid for it.” “Everyone does foolish things when they’re young,” Scarlet agreed softly,
nodding his head. She shivered, but there was a hint of a smile at the corners of her mouth. “John was a real whirlwind;
completely different to every other guy I’d dated. His hair was green and he
dressed totally in black. He told
me that he was studying English, and in Halls at St. Jude’s. I thought it was
odd I hadn’t heard of it, but it was a big university. Even some of the
professors still got lost.” “I don’t blame John for what happened, the route he took me on, I was
quite happily going there on my own, but he gave me a lift. I was drinking, cutting classes, waking
up some nights and having no idea what had happened, ditching my friends.” She
sighed. “Everyone was worried; they could all see I had a problem. Everyone, but
me.” Paul tried to picture the Rhapsody he knew, happier underneath a plane
than at a party, doing all this, but gave up. People changed, and something told
him that she needed to tell someone this, whatever this was. “The first hint we got that anything was going on, was at the annual
Christmas Bazaar at Church. I’d been dragged there by my mum. I didn’t want to
go. At the last moment, I persuaded John to accompany me. It was exactly as it
always was, as it always had been, and I hated it. John dragged me aside into
one of the rooms the Sunday School met in, off the main hall. He’d brought some
Vodka with him - it was what he always drank, a Martini, shaken not stirred,
like James Bond he used to joke - and we were drinking it and fooling around.
Suddenly, John fell forward on to the floor. I shook him, but I couldn’t wake
him. That sobered me up pretty quickly. I ran out, almost colliding with Kate
Atkins.” “Kate Atkins?” Paul asked, stunned. “As in Kate Atkins, President of the
British Red Cross? I remember you mentioning you knew her, but I didn’t think
you went that far back.” “The same, though at that point, she was just a university student doing
first aid duties in her spare time. I’d known Kate since we were both children.
I babbled at her to help John, and that he was in the Sunday School room. She
tried to calm me down, and called Byron, who I’d also known since childhood,
over - to act as a chaperone.” At Paul’s expression she shrugged. “Males can’t treat females unsupervised
and vice versa. Their Duty Officer, Marion Hill, was a bit of a stickler about
that.” She sighed. “My mum found me. She wanted me to meet someone; the details
are a little hazy, but what I remember very clearly is Kate and Byron pulling me
away, and demanding to know what I thought I was playing at. I told them I
didn’t have a clue what they were talking about, and Kate said, that my joke
wasn’t funny, that it had got them into trouble and could have cost someone
their life. When I asked them ‘what joke’, Byron told me that they had gone into
the Sunday School room, to look for my “collapsed casualty”, but the room was
empty and in darkness.” “They’d got the room wrong,” Paul suggested, shrugging. Caroline nodded. “That’s what they thought too, or that I had; they could both smell the
alcohol on my breath, so they checked all the other rooms that the Sunday School
used. That’s why they were in trouble. They hadn’t reported in what the
situation was, so the duty officer got worried that it was serious and sent
another couple after them, with a defibrillator. When they couldn’t find either
the casualty or them, she was pretty cross. I called them liars and stormed off
into the graveyard. Sitting on a tombstone, I found John. He told me that he’d
just come out for a smoke, that he’d never seen anyone in a Red Cross uniform.
Looking back, that should have warned me something was up, as both Kate and
Byron were very conscientious in their duties, and they’d never have abandoned a
casualty, but, at the time, I just joined him in bad-mouthing them.” She paused, chewing her lip. “Things were getting ugly.
I was hanging out with John, drinking worse than ever. And a few days before the
end of term, I was approached by a very worried Kate. ‘Caroline,’ she said, ‘I
think you need help.’” “I demanded to know what she was on about. She hummed and aah’d, but
eventually admitted that the night before she’d been coming back from a spell on
duty, when she saw me in a car, with a guy all in black. While she couldn’t
prove anything, she was fairly sure that he’d been drunk. I told her she was
mistaken, that it couldn’t have been me.
She asked where I’d been that night anyway. I thought, but I...I couldn’t
remember. Kate started trying to talking to me about how dangerous that was, how
anything could have happened, and I...” She sniffed. “I snapped at her, called
her some horrible, horrible things, which brought Byron over to me. He also told
me a few home truths, which, of course, I didn’t want to hear.” She paused. “That’s the thing I regret the most about what happened. Byron and Kate
were, are, good people. They both volunteered tirelessly with the Red Cross, and
when the Terrorism Wars started, both were out there, trying to help people.
Byron was actually shot by Renegades, when he tried to save the life of a
wounded soldier.” She rubbed at her eyes, praying she wasn’t going to start crying. Not
here. Not now. “Kate also said that the oldest member, a guy called Rob Hill, had seen me
too. I called him a blind old fool, especially when I learnt that he’d told Kate
to ‘get her away from him at any cost’. She’d no idea what that meant at the
time, anymore than I did.” “But you know now?” Caroline swallowed, the tears running down her cheeks. “It was Boxing Day. We’d arranged to meet up after dark. John was so full of good cheer; I
knew he’d been drinking. He suggested we go some place different. There was a
club on the way out of town, the Night Owl.
We’d all heard of it. It was trouble.”
She was shaking now, as well as crying. “We were drinking. I ordered a
double whisky, John had a Martini. There was a guy at the next table, making
eyes at me. I was drunk, flattered and flirting.” She closed her eyes, trying to shut out the memories. “I went to the ladies, and… when I got back… ” Scarlet offered her a
tissue and she grabbed it gratefully. “John had agreed to race the guy; he
thought it was laugh! Even though this guy was so drunk he could hardly walk. I
tried to talk him out of it, pleading with him to stop. But he told me I was
being a square. He all but dragged me into his car. Called me his good luck
charm.” The tissue was sodden, and Paul didn’t dare move to get another. He sensed
that, like the Ancient Mariner, Rhapsody needed to tell someone this. “We were going fast. Too fast. I kept yelling at him to slow down, to
stop, to do...something. I had a sort of dog’s collar bracelet; you know the
ones with the spikes? It caught him
on the face when I was hitting at him, and... the flesh tore away. His face was
a skull. I was sitting next to a corpse!” She was all but shrieking and Scarlet glanced nervously towards the
corridor, relieved that the music was so loud. Rhapsody stopped and breathed for a few minutes trying to collect herself. “I just opened the door and flung myself out of that car. I hate to think
what could have happened to me that night.
We were on the M25, just before it closed for good. and while it was
quiet, there was still some traffic about, but I got lucky. I ran into friends.”
She swallowed. “In our area the Red Cross had a victims’ support unit; they
helped out after fires and that sort of thing, and I literally landed on the
tarmac in front of their van. Kate, Byron and Rob Hill, were on board. Rob was
driving, he slammed on the brakes and Kate and Byron jumped out. I told them
everything, although, I’m not sure how much of what I said made sense. Kate was
sitting beside me, and Byron was talking on the radio, when there was a terrific
explosion. Byron and Rob grabbed their gear from the back and were starting off,
when there was another explosion that just threw us all back.
Rob was the first one to his feet, and he started moving, barely aware of the
rest of us. He kept muttering, “no, not again!” She shook herself. “We were too late. The cops said that the guy must have been going at
nearly 100 miles an hour when the car hit a guard rail. By that time we got
there, the place was an inferno. There was nothing anyone could do. The police
said he must have been dead before the fire started. I pray to God they’re
right.” “What happened to John?” Paul asked, his heart pounding even while he
fought to keep his expression neutral. Caroline shook her head. “There was no evidence of him. None of the patrons at the club remembered
anyone with me; everyone said I’d been in there alone. I got a lecture on the
dangers of that; the police thought it had been an attempted rape gone wrong,
that the dead guy had spiked my drink and I’d been lucky enough to get out of
the car before it crashed. They wanted to use it in their “Don’t Drink and
Drive” adverts that year. I tried to tell the sergeant that they were wrong, but
Rob Hill…” She shook her head. “He told me not to say too much to the police,
but to come and meet him in the New Year, once I’d got myself together.” She looked at Paul, very seriously. This was the part she wasn’t entirely
sure she’d have believed herself if she hadn’t been there. Byron had always
insisted there had to be another explanation, that the car could have gone over
the embankment, even though he and Kate had searched there with a torch that
very night, and in the weeks that followed. “When I met him, he showed me some old photos, from the club that used to
stand where the Night Owl was. Revs, I think it was called. There was his wife,
Margery, her sister Joan, and John.” “No,” Caroline said quietly. “No, that might have been kinder.” She sat up
straighter. “Margery was the eldest of three sisters. Joan was apparently the
wild one, one of the bright young things. John was her boyfriend, a real bad lot
according to Rob. The family thought he was completely without morals. About a
week before Christmas, according to Rob, she was at the club that stood on the
site of the Night Owl, along with her younger sister, Veronica. John took them
there and said he’d give them a lift home, but he was drunk.” She swallowed. “They never made it home. John crashed the car into a tree. Joan was
dragged from the car, horribly burnt, but alive. Veronica was killed.” She
paused licking her lips. “According to Rob, Joan never said a word after the
accident; by all accounts she was virtually catatonic. She spent the rest of her
life in an institution, where she died of natural causes. John didn’t survive
the crash.” “What did Rob mean by “get her away from him at any cost”?” Paul asked, slightly confused. Caroline shivered. “Rob told me the family always thought that Joan might have had something
to do with the accident. They don’t think she meant to kill them both, but...
It was well known that he’d been unfaithful to her. There were a couple of
stories of his other affairs that, if they weren’t quite technically rape, came
dangerously close. One of these,” she swallowed, “was with Veronica. The barman
said that John had only had a glass of gin, that he wasn’t drunk, not that
anyone believed him. The family…” She chewed on her lip.
“…always wondered if Joan had spiked his drink, with tragic consequences.”
Despite the warmth of the lounge, Paul shivered. Rhapsody smiled slightly, a bitter smile. “In one sense, what happened
with John was a good thing. I started hanging out with Byron and Kate again,
quit drinking, Byron was actually the one who got me involved with engines. He
had this old banger that continuously broke down and of course being a student
he could never afford to repair it. I offered to help, to keep my mind off what
happened. Turned out I was a natural.” She shrugged. “MI6 recruited me, for
that, and for the martial arts I got involved with for the same reasons, just
after I graduated. And that led me here, which I wouldn’t change for the world,
but...” she shook her head. “Now you know why I hate this time of year,” Caroline said. Captain Scarlet nodded as the strains of Silent Night penetrated the night. Acknowledgements: This story was beta-read by members of the Beta-Readers Panel. Any
remaining mistakes are the author's. The rights to
'Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons'Ó are owned by Carlton International
Media. The series was created by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson.
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