Chapter 8

It was a lovely day and I’d just had good, if proxy, anal sex with a beautiful girl, but I couldn’t help feeling depressed. How had the girl found me? What had she meant by ‘going well’? Would I ever be free of her? Would I end up in prison? Those thoughts and more kept swirling around in my head, distracting me so much that I couldn’t remember any details from my journey home.

The distraction was so great that I didn’t even notice the winking light on my answering machine until late evening. I played the message. It was from Lamont Fisher.

“Hello Mr Pearson. I’m just calling to let you know the pulse emitters have arrived. And there’s an extra I didn’t know about, a remote control unit so you can switch the array on and off without even going outside. Give me a call and we can arrange a date and time for me to come over and install them.”

I guess it wasn’t very considerate to return Lamont’s call so late, but I was enthused by the possibility of something that might help my predicament. Lamont answered his phone almost immediately and didn’t seem at all upset by the lateness of my call. He said that he was busy the next morning because he had to accompany his wife to church, but he could come round and do the installation in the afternoon. That was fine with me, the sooner the better.

Lamont Fisher turned up at three the next afternoon as agreed. I thought about bringing him up-to-date with my latest encounters with the girl, but mentioning St Peter’s Church might have aroused his suspicions if he’d heard the news about the break-in.

Lamont carried his suitcase and a mallet in from his car while I carried in a large but slim, sealed cardboard box since I was younger and fitter. “I haven’t opened that to check the contents,” Lamont joked. “I hope it’s not empty or broken.”

I offered Lamont refreshments but he declined, saying he was eager to start playing with the pulse emitters. We opened the box and found three tubular pulse emitters affixed to spikes, looking for all the world like the solar-powered lights people use to illuminate their driveways at night. A fourth also had the tubular structure and spike but also had a control box attached with a keyhole in it. More rummaging inside the cardboard box uncovered a shrink-wrapped instruction booklet, a pair of keys, a small remote control unit and a couple of AA batteries.

Lamont inserted the batteries into the remote. It had an ‘On’/’Off’ switch and a pair of sliders with a ‘Transmit’ button underneath. “‘On’ and ‘Off’ are self evident and transmit to the master unit automatically,” Lamont explained. “The left slider is for the frequency of pulses and the right slider is for the pulse strength. If you set both to maximum, the pulse emitters will quickly run out of power then go dead until the sun can recharge them. When you’ve adjusted the slider settings as you want, you need to press the ‘Transmit’ button. The red LED shows the settings have been transmitted to the master unit. There shouldn’t be any problem with range for a property the size of yours.”

Lamont set the switch to ‘On’ and a red LED on the remote flashed. Then he moved both sliders about a quarter of the way up and pressed the ‘Transmit’ button. The red LED flashed again.

Lamont handed me the remote then picked up the pulse emitter with the control box. “This is the master unit,” he said. “You can still operate the system from it even if you lose the remote.” Using one of the keys, he unlocked the control box and showed me inside. There were toggle switches labelled ‘On/Off’ and ‘Manual/Remote’, and a couple of sliders identical to the ones on the remote.

“You’ll probably want to leave it ‘On’ all the time unless you’re repositioning pulse emitters,” said Lamont. “‘Manual’ means to obey the settings on these sliders, ‘Remote’ means to obey the settings on the remote. You can tell when they pulse because this red LED flashes.”

I hadn’t noticed the LED on the pulse emitter because it was pretty inconspicuous.

Lamont turned the control unit upside down. At the top, between the fins of the spike, was another keyhole. Lamont unlocked it with a key and the unit and spike neatly separated. “You hammer the spike firmly in the ground, leaving room to insert the key. Then you put the pulse emitter on top and lock it in place,” he explained. “Your rear garden is more secure than the front, isn’t it? I recommend you site the control unit out back.”

I nodded. That made sense.

Lamont unlocked one of the slave units from its spike. “Let’s put these two in place.”

I escorted Lamont into the back garden and we worked out the best places for the two units. Lamont held the spikes in position while I drove them into the ground with his mallet, then Lamont locked the pulse emitter units back onto their spikes. On the master unit, Lamont set the sliders to minimum, and the toggle switches to ‘Remote’ and ‘On’, then he locked the control box.

“Press the button on the remote,” said Lamont.

I pressed the button. The red LED on the remote flashed but the red LEDs on the pulse emitters stayed off.

“They’ll take a few minutes to charge,” said Lamont. “Let’s do the front while we’re waiting.”

The process was repeated at the front of the house after we chose locations for the units that were not shaded, but also not visible to passers-by.

Lamont opened his suitcase and took out a meter. “Let’s go and check they’re working.”

Lamont handed me the meter and we went outside to check the rear units first because they’d had longest exposure to the sun. From close to, I aimed the meter at the first unit. The unit’s red LED flashed and the meter jerked briefly to the right. It was about five seconds until it flashed again and out of the corner of my eye I noticed the LED on the other unit flash at the same time.

“Great, they’re in sync,” said Lamont. “I don’t know about ghosts but that should be often enough to keep cats at bay, and at that low setting it will probably go all night on a full day’s charge.”

We checked the units at the front and by now they were pulsing in sync too.

“Good job,” I congratulated. “Fancy a beer to celebrate?”

“Another time perhaps, when I’m not driving.”

I paid Lamont, then making sure I had the keys and the remote, he packed his meter in the suitcase then put it in his car along with his mallet. “Like the set that was out of stock, the guarantee is for ten years,” he said as we made a parting handshake. “The details are at the back of the instruction booklet. But call me first if you have any problems.” Then he drove off.

The next day, as usual, I bought a copy of the local paper on my way into work for reading later.

I double-checked who was due to produce the components I had worked on the previous Friday. It turned out to be one of the two girls on the project, Stella Mason. She was a quiet, homely girl but a good worker. When I tracked her down, she was actually looking at the specification of the bespoke component I had partially fabricated. She didn’t look happy.