Ripples of the Past

by Damian Knight

  After that he kept his head down, and as the days of his first week at Knotsbridge slowly passed and the prospect of his seizures ever returning faded, he settled into a routine of sorts.

  Lights on was at seven a.m., followed by breakfast in the canteen and a trip to the windowed counter of the medical room, where he now took his epilepsy pill willingly. Then it was thirty minutes of compulsory exercise in the yard with the other boys from Unit B.

  While inside, inmates were expected to enrol on one of the educational or vocational courses available, and the rest of the mornings were given over to what were known as ‘activities’. Although there wasn't much chance of being accepted to university if convicted, Sam decided he might as well continue his A-levels through a distance-learning programme instead of signing up for one of the over-subscribed construction or mechanics courses. Perhaps he was clinging to a remnant of his old life, but there was something reassuring about the familiarity of schoolwork, plus he got to spend most of his time in the empty library, which suited him down to the ground.

  Lunch was at 11:30, and then he was back in his cell for another hour and a half. Afternoon activities ran until 4 p.m., followed by two more hours in his cell before an hour’s ‘association’. Along with exercise in the yard, this was by far the worst part of the day, as Sam was forced to mix with the other inmates. Most were serving time for gang-related crimes, with some already on their third or fourth convictions. Luckily word seemed to have spread that Sam was awaiting trial for murder, and apart from a few menacing stares thrown in his direction, he was pretty much left to himself.

  After dinner in the canteen at 7 p.m., he was taken to the medical room for his evening pill and then locked in his cell again. Lights out was at eleven, and that was it until the following morning, when the whole process started afresh.

  All of that time in his cell gave Sam plenty of chance for reflection. There could be no hiding from the fact that he had made a total mess of the second chance granted to him in this timeline, and, barring the sort of intervention that had saved him on Christmas Eve, would probably wind up serving a prison sentence for a crime he didn’t commit.

  He often found himself contemplating what Eva was doing in this timeline, and what she would make of the news of his arrest. The things they had shared in December had been erased from her memory, leaving only the faltering friendship briefly established in Montclair late last summer. The Eva who only he could remember had told Sam that he just needed to come and find her, but if he was convicted they would both be well into their twenties by the time he was released, by which time she could already be married with children. If she’d even speak to him, that was.

  Things might have been so different if only he had used Tetradyamide to go back to save Fairview’s life, but with no way of correcting his mistakes the future looked unavoidably bleak. In his darkest hours he even found himself wondering if the charges against him might be true, and whether he had lost his mind after his brain injury and imagined everything that he thought had taken place since.

  There was, however, one small crumb of comfort. Assuming he hadn’t really killed Malcolm Fairview, someone else must have, and if that person could be found it might exonerate Sam. Unfortunately there wasn’t much he could do about it without a lawyer. Chrissie had told him that she was looking for a new one, so it appeared Sam would just have to wait for visitors’ day and hope for better news.

  On the Friday at the end of his first week, a welcome break appeared in his routine. Instead of association at 6 p.m., Sam was escorted to the central hub. He was led to a room on the top floor, where he found a small, bearded man sitting on a foldout chair.

  ‘Ah, good evening,’ the man said, looking up from a folder spread open in his lap. ‘It’s Sam, yes? I’m Neal, the institute psychologist. Please, take a weight off.’

  Sam nodded and sat on a second foldout chair that had been positioned to face Neal’s. Like pretty much everywhere else in Knotsbridge, the room smelled strongly of damp and, judging by the industrial floor polisher leaning against the far wall, doubled as a storage cupboard.

  ‘I think I can take it from here, thank you Pete,’ Neal said, and crossed his legs at the knee, leaving one socked and sandalled foot dangling a few inches above the lino floor.

  The guard, who was hanging back by the door, frowned. ‘You sure? He’s a slippery little so-and-so, this one.’

  Neal removed a small plastic box from the pocket of his jacket and waved it in the air. ‘I have my panic button, see? Have no fear, my good man, I shan’t hesitate to use it if needs must. But I don’t think that will be necessary, will it, Sam?’

  Sam shook his head.

  ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you,’ Pete said, and stepped out, closing the door behind him.

  Neal smiled at Sam for an uncomfortably long moment, then licked his thumb and turned a page in his folder. ‘Hmm, it says here that you were placed on remand last week, awaiting trial for murder. Is that correct?’

  ‘I didn’t do it!’ Sam blurted out, almost instinctively.

  ‘Um-hum.’ Neal clicked the push button on his ballpoint pen and made a quick note. ‘I beg your pardon, awaiting trial for an alleged murder.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right, I suppose.’

  ‘What I have here is a transcript of the interview conducted after your arrest. It says, and I quote, “The truth is I first met Malcolm Fairview just over a month ago. He was a scientist at the Tempus Project, a secret government organisation researching time-travel abilities in people with traumatic brain injuries, people like me.” Sound familiar?’

  ‘If that’s what it says.’

  Neal made another note and began twirling his pen between his fingers. ‘You do realise that time travel isn’t possible, don’t you?’

  ‘But—’

  ‘And the Security Service have no record of a “Tempus Project” or anything remotely like it under their network of operations.’

  ‘That’s a lie!’ Sam protested, leaning forward in his chair. ‘All right, in this reality the Tempus Project was shut down after Thames House bombing, but it still existed before that. There must be records somewhere.’

  ‘This reality?’ Neal said. ‘You make it sound as if there were any other.’ He jotted yet another note in his folder, then clicked the nib of his pen away. ‘The thing you need to realise, Sam, is that these are no more than delusions, a fantasy world you’ve constructed to help you cope with what by any stretch must have been a difficult few months. Like I said, time travel doesn’t exist, and the notion that the Security Service would condone such pseudoscience, let alone fund it, is frankly inconceivable. I’m here to help you, Sam. I only want the truth.’

  Sam wrung his hands in his lap. He was all too aware of where telling the truth had got him so far, and what Neal had just said struck a chord with his own worst fears.

  ‘You expect me to tell you I made the whole thing up?’ he said eventually. ‘What I told the police is the truth.’

  Neal gave a weary nod, closed his folder and stood. ‘In that case I think we’re done for today. Unless you’re able to see your delusions for what they really are, Sam, then I think treating you may be beyond the scope of my skills. The best place for you might be a secure psychiatric hospital.’

  ‘Can’t be any worse than this place,’ Sam muttered.

  ‘I wouldn’t be so sure of that. We’ll discuss that matter further in our next session, but in the meantime I’d like you to have a long, hard think about what really happened.’

  6

  George was flat on his back, staring up at the ceiling. Hinds snored lightly beside him with her arm flopped across his chest. Reaching over, he covered her nostrils with his thumb and forefinger. After a couple of seconds she spluttered, withdrew her arm and rolled over to face the other way.

  Although their affair was only a few days old, he was beginning to tire of the whole sham. Hinds was eager to please and, he supposed, the sex was enjoyable
enough, providing a necessary outlet for his bodily urges, but it had taken only a couple of dates for her true colours to come to the fore as she’d begun constantly wheedling for compliments and assurances which he was forced to supply in order to maintain his guise. Ho-hum. If he was ever to win the prize he so craved, sacrifices would need to be made along the way, however it was becoming increasingly clear that the sooner he could complete his task and be rid of the irritating woman the better.

  Moving slowly so as to prevent the springs of the mattress creaking, George slid from under the sheets, climbed out and reattached his prosthetic leg. A streetlamp on the other side of the curtains filled the small bedroom of Hinds’s ex-council flat with a faint glow. He picked his way over the mounds of discarded clothing littering the floor to the dressing table chair, where his own attire lay neatly folded. One of his cufflinks had become loose again and lay glinting on the floor. He scooped it up, popped it in his shirt pocket and then slid his good leg into his trousers. His prosthetic proved more problematic. As he twisted and turned to free the carbon-fibre foot from a fold of material, he wobbled, lost his balance and had to grab hold of the dressing table to stop from crashing to the floor. A perfume bottle toppled over and rolled towards the edge. As it dropped, he reached up and caught it.

  Holding his breath, George glanced over his shoulder. Hinds was still facing the other way, her long, dark hair spread across the pillow and her body rising and falling in time with her muffled snores. One of the manifold problems of one-leggedness was that it did not exactly lend itself to stealth, but at least he’d had the foresight to ply her with alcohol the previous evening (not that she needed much encouragement) and with any luck she wouldn’t wake for several hours.

  He returned the perfume bottle to its previous position, let himself out of the bedroom and gently eased the door closed. The open plan living-room-cum-kitchen was in a similar state of disarray, with an empty wine bottle and the remnants of last night’s takeaway festering on the table. He crossed the room, his skin tightening as he passed a sofa plastered with cat hair. The culprit, a mangy, flea-bitten tabby named Hercule, lay curled in a basket on the other side of the room.

  Upon reaching Hinds’s desk, George switched on the computer and then stretched to retrieve the miniature camera he’d hidden on the top shelf of the bookcase two days earlier. The monitor flickered into life, displaying a blue screen. He placed the camera in his pocket, pulled out a flash drive, plugged it into the USB port and entered the password he’d filmed her using before they met for drinks last night. The screen cut to a desktop background of Hinds and her three brothers grinning like idiots, all in muddy rugby shirts. Shaking his head, George clicked on a folder titled Work Stuff and scrolled down until he located another marked Fairview Case. He dragged and dropped the contents to his flash drive and then, as it loaded across, limped to the coat stand by the front door.

  Hinds’s coat was hanging beneath his own. He rifled through the pockets until he located her set of keys. Aside from the two she had used to unlock the front door, there was no way of knowing which was which, so he pressed each of the remaining seven keys into a putty mold disguised as a business card holder.

  He was on the last key when something brushed against the ankle of his left leg. Glancing down, he saw Hercule circling his feet.

  ‘Piss off!’ he muttered, flapping at the cat.

  In response, Hercule purred and nuzzled the shin of his prosthetic.

  George muttered a few choice insults, then drove his toe into the filthy animal’s ribcage, launching it into the air. Hercule mewed, twisted in midflight and, as cats have a way of doing, somehow righted itself before landing on all fours. With a hiss, it scurried back to the kitchen, ears pressed flat to its head.

  ‘George?’ Hinds called from the bedroom. ‘What you doing, hun?’

  He spun around, wincing as his false leg failed to follow. Which pocket had he found her keys in? With no time to think, he shoved them into the nearest one and hobbled back to the computer. The download window indicated there were ten seconds remaining.

  ‘Come on, come on,’ George growled, one hand on the flash drive.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he spied the handle of the bedroom door turn. There was a gentle ping and the download window disappeared. He yanked the flash drive out, dropped it in his pocket, hit the power button and turned around.

  Hinds stepped into the room, rubbing her sleep-encrusted eyes. ‘What are you doing out of bed?’ she asked. ‘It’s four in the morning.’

  ‘I thought I heard a noise.’

  Hercule slunk from the kitchen, glared at George and hurried over to its mistress.

  ‘Probably just the cat.’ She scooped the vile beast up and, scratching it behind the ears, carried it over to the kitchen, where she opened a sachet of cat food and emptied the contents into a bowl. ‘You were just hungry, weren’t you, my little French detective?’

  ‘There’s been a spate of burglaries in the area,’ George said, resisting the urge to inform her that Agatha Christie’s famous creation was, in fact, a Belgian. ‘You can never be too careful in this day and age.’

  Hinds stepped towards him, hooking the fallen strap of her nightdress over her shoulder. ‘My knight in shining armour,’ she said, and linked her arms around his waist. ‘Trying to protect me, were you?’

  George did his best to disguise his gag reflex at her stale breath and somehow turned it into a bashful smile. ‘Guilty as charged, my lady.’

  ‘We’re perfectly safe. Listen, hun, I was thinking of inviting my brother and his wife over for dinner tomorrow evening. They can’t wait to meet you.’

  ‘Can’t,’ he said, perhaps a little too hurriedly, and cleared his throat. ‘Remember that job interview I told you about? I’ll be out of town for a couple of days at least.’

  She pouted exaggeratedly.

  ‘How about next weekend?’ he asked, knowing full well that if everything went to plan he’d be long gone by then. ‘I think my diary’s pretty clear.’

  Hinds smiled again and stood on tiptoes to kiss him on the lips. ‘Sounds good,’ she said. ‘Sooo…now the flat’s clear of burglars and Hercule has a full stomach, what do you say we go back to bed? If I’m not going to see you for a couple of days, we’ll just have to make the most of this morning.’

  ‘With pleasure,’ George said, and let her lead him back to the bedroom.

  7

  It was Saturday afternoon, and Chrissie and her mum had taken a taxi to visit Sam for what would be the first (and hopefully the last) time since he had been charged with murder. From a distance Knotsbridge Young Offenders Institution looked almost grand, but as they passed through a gate in the wall she noticed the crumbling brickwork and cracked tiles in the roof.

  The driver dropped them outside the visitors’ entrance, where there was already a queue forming. They joined the back, Chrissie’s mother glancing about with eager anticipation as though they were waiting to enter an art gallery or museum. Chrissie’s stomach churned when she spotted the guards searching each person at the door, and as they edged closer she hoped her anxiety wasn’t obvious for all to see. She needn’t have worried, though; there was only a single female guard on duty and, already dealing with a backlog, the flustered woman only gave Chrissie a half-hearted pat down and a cursory rummage through her handbag before waving her through.

  They filed into a wide, damp-smelling hall filled with tables and chairs. Chrissie led her mum to a table near the middle, as far as possible from the prying eyes of the guards stationed around the edge.

  After a couple of minutes Sam was escorted through a set of double doors at the other end. He craned his neck and glanced about before spotting them, then hurried over and threw his arms around Chrissie and their mum before breaking down in a fit of tears. It took him a minute or two to pull himself together, after which he took a seat at the opposite side of the table and dabbed his face with his sleeve. There were dark circles beneath hi
s eyes and it looked as though he’d lost weight.

  Their mother, who’d been staring about with a vacant expression, suddenly perked up. ‘I must say, sweetie, I don’t think much of your new school. The least they could do is offer us a cup of tea. Wouldn’t you rather sit your A-levels somewhere else?’

  Sam gulped and looked down.

  ‘This isn’t a school, Mum,’ Chrissie said, resting a hand on her arm, ‘it’s a young offenders institute. Sam was arrested last week, remember?’

  ‘Well, it could still do with a lick of paint.’

  No one said anything for a while, and then Sam looked up again. ‘I can’t handle it in here,’ he said. ‘I’ve been seeing this psychologist, Neal. He thinks I’m delusional and imagined the whole thing. He says they’ll move me to a secure psychiatric hospital unless I can see my delusions for what they are. What if he’s right, Chrissie? What if I really did imagine the whole thing?’

  ‘You didn’t,’ she said.

  ‘Really? You seemed pretty unconvinced the last time I saw you.’

  ‘Lance told me everything.’ As casually as she could manage, Chrissie bent to unzip her boot and withdrew the folded piece of paper tucked into her sock. ‘He also gave me this.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Sam said, frowning as she slid it across the table.

  ‘It’s one of those pills you asked me to find.’

  He opened and closed his mouth, looking like he might fall out of his seat. Slowly he unwrapped the paper and let out a gasp as he stared down at the yellow pill inside.