by Jason Ayres
“Sounds like a plan,” replied Josh, happy to have some sort of purpose at last.
“We’ll start tomorrow,” he added.
Chapter Eleven
Saturday 11th January 1992
“Blimey, this lot can’t be short of a few bob,” remarked Peter.
He and Josh were standing at the entrance to the gravel driveway of an impressive Victorian house on Woodstock Road in Oxford. Set over three floors, with imposing bay windows and small turrets on either side, it reeked of wealth. The Bentley parked on the drive merely served to complete the picture.
“What did you expect, with a name like Jonty Barrington-Smythe?” replied Josh. “It’s hardly Fred Bloggs, is it?”
“I find it a bit intimidating,” said Peter, his enthusiasm deserting him. “There’s something about the rich I find a bit disconcerting. You know, the way they look down at us little people?”
“I think you’re making a bit of an assumption there,” said Josh. “This lad can’t help that he was born into money. He might be a perfectly nice young man.”
Josh said this more in hope than expectation. In his time lecturing at the university he had taught many who had been born with silver spoons in their mouths. Many of them had been perfectly decent and pleasant young people. Unfortunately there were more than a few who were not, going through life with a sense of entitlement, looking down at the plebs, chavs, or whatever the latest fashionable term was for anyone they deemed to be lower on the social scale than themselves.
He really hoped Jonty wasn’t going to turn out to be one of the latter, especially after he had tried to defend him before he had even met him.
“Come on, we’ve made the effort to come here, we may as well get on with it now,” said Josh, striding confidently up to the front door, with Peter trailing along reluctantly in his wake.
“Did you see what I did there?” said Josh. “Marching up to the front door as if I own the place? That’s the way you have to be with these people. That way they’ll respect you. Show them the slightest hint that you might feel overawed by their money or social class and you’ve had it.”
“But there’s no one even looking!” said Peter.
“Start as you mean to go on,” replied Josh confidently as he pressed the doorbell. A shrill tone rang out.
The house was so impressive that Peter half-expected some sort of butler to come to the door but after a long wait it was Jonty who answered, looking like he had just got out of bed. He had a shock of black hair atop a narrow face with thin lips and a jutting-out chin that instantly made Peter think of Jimmy Hill from Match of the Day. He was wearing a ruffled, expensive white shirt that he looked like he had slept in. Either that or he didn’t bother with ironing.
Before Josh or Peter could introduce themselves, Jonty launched into a condescending tirade, delivered in an accent that had more than one plum in the mouth.
“Oh Lordy, this really is too much. Didn’t they teach people to read at whatever comprehensive school you went to? Look, there’s a sign there on the door, it says quite clearly No Hawkers, No Circulars and nothing bought at the door. I really am going to have to ask Daddy to install a proper gate to keep you people at bay.”
Within about two seconds of him starting this rant, Josh knew he was one of the latter type of wealthy student and he hadn’t finished yet.
“I really have better things to do with my day than getting up at the crack of dawn to deal with every Tom, Dick or Harry that comes round here trying to sell us double glazing, or cheap and nasty dishcloths, or whatever other tat they seem to labour under the illusion that people of our calibre might be remotely interested in buying.”
He paused at this point, finally giving Josh a chance to speak. Jonty had said more than enough in his little rant to make Josh utterly despise him, but they had come here for a reason and he wasn’t about to back out just because the guy was a grade A twat.
“Relax, Jonty, we aren’t here to sell you anything. We just want to have a little chat.”
“Oh, journalists, are you? Sniffing round for a story after that piece in the Oxford Mail, no doubt? Which rag are you from?”
He looked them up and down before concluding, “One of the tabloids by the look of you. Well, if you want a story it will cost you.”
“Haven’t you got enough money already?” asked Peter. Jonty was turning out to be everything he had feared he would be.
“You can never have too much,” replied Jonty, smirking. “And if you poor people want to give me more, who am I to argue?”
“Look, we’re not journalists,” said Josh. “We’re just genuinely interested in what happened to you when you disappeared and all we want is five minutes of your time. We think there’s a mystery about how and why you disappeared and we think we can get to the bottom of it. If what we think may have happened has happened then I am sure you are curious about it, too, and this story about being drunk you gave to the paper is just to cover up something you can’t explain.”
Surprisingly, Jonty didn’t dismiss them, replying, “Very well. You had better come in. But please take your shoes off, and don’t touch anything. There are a lot of valuable antiques in here, you know.”
He opened the door wider and beckoned for them to come inside. This was promising, concluded Josh. He must be curious about what had happened to him.
“Come through to the drawing room,” he said, setting off down a lengthy corridor as they removed his shoes.
“Charming fellow,” remarked Peter, just loud enough for Josh to hear, but out of earshot of their host. Josh repressed an urge to giggle. This bloke really was quite unbelievable.
The drawing room was spacious, with an impressive chandelier hanging from the ceiling. The walls were decorated in a Georgian style, with various Old Masters hanging from the walls. Barrington-Smythe senior had clearly done rather well for himself.
As soon as all three of them were in the room, Jonty rounded on them.
“Right, then, you chaps, what’s all this about? You’ve got five minutes.”
He didn’t offer them a seat or a cup of tea. Clearly they weren’t expected to be here for long.
“It’s quite simple, really,” began Josh, deciding to go with his usual strategy of just coming out with it. “We’re in the business of time travel and we’re investigating a possible anomaly in Oxford.”
“Keep talking,” said Jonty, clearly keen to hear more.
“This story in the paper about you disappearing for the best part of a month and blaming it on going on a massive bender doesn’t quite ring true,” said Peter, taking up the reins.
Josh was impressed by the younger man. After what he had said earlier, he thought that Jonty might have intimidated him, but he was rising to the challenge well.
“I don’t think you know where you were during those four weeks,” added Peter. “In fact, I think you’re probably quite worried about it.”
“It’s true,” admitted Jonty, dropping his superior demeanour for a moment now that he could see these people might be of use to him. “I can’t explain it. But you think you can?”
“Possibly,” said Josh. He didn’t want to give too much away and certainly wasn’t taking this arrogant toff into his confidence. He just wanted to establish the facts and get out.
“Why don’t you tell us exactly where you were when all this happened?” suggested Peter.
“I’ll do my best,” replied Jonty. “But I was a tad squiffy so the old grey matter’s a bit hazy. You see, I’d been out for the evening with the chaps from the Bullingdon Club. It was our end-of-term bash, so as you can imagine the old champers was flowing rather freely.”
There hadn’t been any champagne at Peter’s Christmas bash. His drunken bravado when kissing Amanda had come from cheap supermarket beer. But he could imagine Jonty and his crowd of Hooray Henrys whooping it up readily enough.
“Where was this end-of-term bash, exactly?” he asked.
“Oh, in the d
ining hall at Magdalen College.”
“And you stayed there all night?” asked Josh.
“Until the end of the evening, then we decided to go to the park.”
“Which park?” asked Josh, suspecting he was going to know the answer.
“Christ Church Meadow,” replied Jonty.
“I thought that was locked at night,” replied Peter.
“It is – but you can get access if you know the right people,” replied Jonty. “George, that’s one of the chaps from the club, has got a key for one of the side gates. Don’t ask me how he got it. George is always up to something or other.”
“Why did you go down to the park at that time of night?” asked Peter.
“Well, it was all a bit of a dare really – bit of high jinks, you know the sort of thing that goes on in the Bullingdon Club.”
“I don’t actually,” replied Peter. “I’m a student at Oxford, too, and I’ve never even heard of it.”
“You wouldn’t have done,” replied Jonty. “It’s very exclusive. No offence, but it’s not really for you student grant types. You have to have a particular sort of breeding to get in.”
“So about this dare,” said Josh, noting the annoyed look on Peter’s face. “What was that all about?”
“Oh yes, well, I dared George to urinate in the font in the college chapel and he did. Then he dared me to swim in the Cherwell naked. I had to do it – it would have been against the whole code of the club if I hadn’t.”
“Whereabouts in the river was this exactly?” asked Josh.
“Just up from the gate, on the corner opposite the school field,” replied Jonty. “I stripped off, went to jump in and then things all went a bit weird. The next thing I remember I’m in the river, swimming butt-naked and bloody freezing and weirdly, it’s broad daylight and there’s no sign of the chaps.”
“That must have been a shock,” said Josh.
“You’re telling me! At first I thought I must have bumped my head when I jumped in and fallen unconscious. I was a bit browned off, I can tell you, especially as it looked like George and the others had all buggered off and left me to drown without raising the alarm.”
Everything Jonty was telling Josh fitted in with his suspicion that there was some sort of time bubble operating down by the river, but why?
“None of my clothes were there,” continued Jonty. “I had to run butt-naked back to the gate. Luckily George has got rooms just up there so I managed to scamper in before I froze to death. You wouldn’t believe the look on his face when he saw me.”
“I can well imagine,” said Josh, who was used to this sort of thing.
“It was only when he started asking questions about where I had been that I realised four weeks had gone missing. He had been home for Christmas and come back while I was gone.”
As Jonty finished this sentence, the doorbell rang.
“Excuse me a moment, will you,” he said, resuming his arrogant persona. “Probably more bloody tin-rattlers. They see a big house and think we’ll donate to whatever bleeding heart liberal cause is flavour of the month. Amnesty International, Red Cross, we get them all round here.”
He disappeared back to the front door, giving Peter and Josh an opportunity to talk.
“Wow,” said Peter. “I think he is possibly the most unpleasant person I have ever met. And you wanted me to give him the benefit of doubt!”
“You know what this means, though, don’t you?” said Josh. “The place he described where he went in the river sounds like the exact spot where I lost the tachyometer.”
“So you’re responsible for all this?”
“It looks like it,” said Josh with a heavy heart. It seemed this was yet another mess of his own making he was going to have to try and fix – if he even could.
The drawing room door reopened, and Jonty entered the room, followed by a young policewoman whom neither Josh nor Peter had seen before, but who they were quickly to discover had similar interests to their own.
“This is WPC Osakwe,” said Jonty. “We’ve just been having a chat at the door and she’s been asking me some of the same questions as you two. That’s rather interesting, don’t you think?”
“And who are you two, exactly?” asked Rebecca, addressing Josh and Peter directly.
“Oh, just private investigators,” said Josh breezily. “We’re not anyone for you to concern yourself with.”
He had no desire to get anyone else involved and especially not the police. If Hannah, Peter’s future wife and the head of the local police, had been here, that would have been different, but she was far in the future.
“Yes, we were just going,” said Peter.
“And you are?” asked Rebecca, looking at him.
Peter caught her gaze and found him drawn to her eyes: they were bright, green and clear. She was very pretty and he felt instantly attracted to her. Without thinking, he blurted out his name: “Peter Grant, officer.”
“Come on,” said Josh, annoyed at Peter blowing their anonymity. “We need to get going.”
“I’ll show you out,” said Jonty.
“There’s no need,” replied Josh.
“But I insist,” said Jonty. “Just to make sure you don’t nick anything on the way out.”
“We’re hardly likely to with the police here, are we?” protested Josh. He resented the implication that because they were mere commoners they must also be dishonest.
“Peter Grant, I may want to speak to you again,” said Rebecca, as Jonty shooed them out of the drawing room. “I’m keen to establish what you know about all this.”
“OK,” said Peter, to an annoyed look from Josh.
“Thank-you for calling round,” said Jonty at the door. “Don’t come again.”
“It’s been an absolute pleasure,” said Josh sarcastically. Then a distant memory struck him, and he couldn’t resist asking one last question.
“Just one final thing before we go,” he said to Jonty. “About this Bullingdon Club of yours – is it true that when you join you have to stick your cock in a dead pig’s mouth?”
“Who told you that?” demanded Jonty, spluttering and turning red with rage. “Any member giving away Club secrets like that should be blackballed on the spot.”
“So it is true, then,” said Josh. “I always knew it was.”
“Get off my property!” shouted Jonty.
“Well technically, it’s not really your property, is it?” said Josh. “It’s all your dad’s. I bet you haven’t done an honest day’s work in your life.”
“Go away,” screamed Jonty doing a very passable impression of a four-year-old throwing a tantrum as he slammed the door in their faces.
“I think you touched a nerve there,” said Peter as they walked back down the path.
“Job well done,” said Josh. “People accuse me of being arrogant, but people like him really need taking down a peg or two. Anyway, we got what we came here for. Let’s go and grab a coffee and mull it all over.”
Peter agreed, still thinking about the pretty policewoman and how he hoped she would be true to her word and he would see her again.
Reaching the red-brick walls at the border of the property, they turned left and headed back down Woodstock Road into town.
Chapter Twelve
Saturday 11th January 1992
Rebecca had followed a similar line of questioning with Jonty to the others, minus the time travel references.
He had shown her rather more respect than he had to Josh and Peter. Wary of the law after a few previous brushes, he was keen not to say anything that might bring an unwanted spotlight his way. Daddy had pulled a fair few strings in the past to get him out of hot water and had made it clear in no uncertain terms that he was running out of favours.
Jonty’s hospitality even stretched to making her a cup of coffee, which was more than the others had got. Now they were seated in the drawing room and Rebecca was quizzing him on the events of the night he had disappeared.
/>
“So let me get this clear again. You decided to go skinny-dipping in the Cherwell in the middle of the night, you bumped your head, and you woke up in the morning on the riverbank.”
“Yes, it’s quite straightforward really. I can’t see what all the fuss is about.” He was keen to get rid of the policewoman as soon as possible but his attempts to brush off what had happened weren’t working.
“But that doesn’t explain where you were for four weeks. Your parents reported you missing.”
“Oh, Mummy probably got her wires crossed. I told her I was spending Christmas with the Johnsons.”
“And where are your parents now?”
“They left first thing this morning. Now they know I’m alright, they’ve headed off to Bermuda. Mummy does so hate the English winter and now Daddy’s retired they go over there every year for a few months. We’ve got property over there, you know. It’s been in the family since colonial times.”
“Really?” replied Rebecca. “I expect they had slaves as well, did they?”
She didn’t like this Jonty at all, despite him putting on the charm for her. She hated the way people like him used their privileged circumstances to their advantage, and in his case she had first-hand evidence.
A few months ago he had been hauled into the station one night on a drugs charge when she was on duty on the front desk. He had been caught red-handed with a substantial amount of cocaine on him. Yet just a few hours later, he was inexplicably released without charge, her boss explaining that it had all been a misunderstanding. This infuriated Rebecca because the order had come through directly from the police commissioner himself. Jonty’s family clearly had friends in high places.
Realising that he had made somewhat of a faux pas in mentioning colonial times in front of Rebecca, he tried to change the subject.
“Anyway, they aren’t here. Now, I really don’t think there’s much more I can tell you, so if that’s all?”
Her comments about slavery had made him feel distinctly uncomfortable and he was now even keener to see the back of her.