The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

by Claire North

  I stared at this child, hundreds–maybe thousands–of years old, and remembered that I was just sixteen, an orphaned teenager from Leeds trying to be cool.

  “Yeah,” I replied in my best local accent. “What’s it to you?”

  “My dad sent me to find you,” he replied firmly. “You dropped this.”

  He handed me, very carefully, a blue paper notebook. It was cheap and a little tatty, and bore inside some unfortunate child’s French homework, pages of the stuff declaring je m’appelle, je suis, je voudrais running down neat rulered margins. I flicked through, then looked up to say, “This isn’t…”

  But the boy was gone.

  Chapter 77

  I didn’t see Vincent again until 1941.

  I did indeed study law, going to Edinburgh University to shiver away over great fat books whose pages crunched with the generations of microscopic paper-munching insects who had lived, bred and died between the judgments. Knowing I would be called up, I pre-empted the moment by enlisting in a Highland regiment, and spent three months being trained in the art of charging at dummies, shooting from behind the safety of a hill and shouting “Kill!” until my ears rang with it. I had a distant recollection that my unit would be largely useless until late into the conflict. We would spend a lot of time training, if memory served, in the art of winter warfare, in expectation of an assault on Norway which wouldn’t come, and finally be dispatched to Normandy several weeks after the beaches had been secured. The worst we’d have it would be in the Ardennes, and I fully intended to keep my head down when that moment came. This would be the seventh time I had fought in the Second World War.

  I saw Vincent Rankis as if by chance, though there was no such thing, during one of our quieter times, waiting for orders in our barracks in Leith. Our days were spent studying maps of places we wouldn’t attack, practising manoeuvres we wouldn’t perform and waiting for orders we didn’t want to receive. Then a sharp “Attention!” and we all snapped up for the arrival of the major and his minions. I was a grudging second lieutenant–grudging in that I didn’t especially relish my commission, and grudging in that it had been grudgingly given in light of my merits and capabilities, as compared to the usual requisites for the post. I had only held my commission for three weeks when my captain complained that I just didn’t talk properly, and rather than at once slip into the more RP accent that I knew was required, I turned up my northern gruff to the point where my reports frequently needed translating for the unfortunate man, much to the amusement of his highly Glaswegian sergeant.

  It was the Glaswegian sergeant who had called us to attention that day, but the major who spoke. He was a decent man who didn’t deserve the death by howitzer that awaited him, but his decency was never of a kindly sort, merely the fixed determination that those who died on his watch did not die because of his inaction.

  “All right, gentlemen,” he grumbled as if the weight of his facial hair prohibited anything but the bare parting of his lips. “We’re just having a look round. Lieutenant August, meet Lieutenant Rankis.”

  I nearly laughed out loud when I saw Vincent dressed up in an officer’s uniform, complete with shiny buttons, cleaned hat, smart boots and a salute so sharp you could have roasted a rabbit on it. He was a boy–a sixteen-year-old boy–yet somehow a hint of beard around his chin and an extra pair of socks shoved down the calves of his trousers and across the back of his shirt had been enough to deceive the army into awarding him a commission. I was never more grateful for the poker face years of being a junior officer on the receiving end of ridiculous orders teaches a man, and earned for my pains a flash of brilliant smile from Vincent’s teeth and eyes.

  “Lieutenant Rankis won’t be with us long,” went on the major, “so I want you all to impress him, please. If you need anything, Harry there is your man. Lieutenant!”

  Another round of salutes. When dealing with senior ranks you had to get used to having a trigger elbow, as well as a trigger finger. I glanced over Vincent’s shoulder and saw the sergeant trying not to laugh. Had he too noticed the fresh face on our infant officer, and the slight bulge around his thighs where he’d padded his uniform to more butch and manly dimensions? I focused on my poker face and salute, and when the major was gone shook Vincent’s hand.

  “Call me Harry,” I said.

  Chapter 78

  There is a ritual I undertake in nearly every life. It is the assassination of Richard Lisle.

  Every life since the first murder I have either dispatched him directly or sent others to do it for me, before he can begin his murdering of the women of Battersea, and every life Rosemary Dawsett and the rest of the girls live a little while longer, not even knowing that their would-be killer is dead. Except for one life, when I didn’t send a killer and couldn’t make the appointment myself, and Rosemary Dawsett died, her body sliced up in the bathtub. I am now so used to killing Richard Lisle it has acquired a rather ritualistic quality. I no longer bother with any fancy preparations, no words or hesitation. I merely go to his flat one day, settle down in a seat away from the window, wait for him to walk through the door and put two through his brain. I have never felt that anything more is required.

  I wonder now if Vincent’s attitude towards me was not entirely dissimilar to my regard for Lisle. Posing no threat, there was no need for him to return to me, but yet return he did, like a fond owner checking up on his favourite pet. As I kept Lisle perpetually in my sights, so he seemed to want to keep me close across the lives. Perhaps he considered my personality of such iron stuff that it might one day return to be a danger to him; perhaps he feared I could regain my memory; perhaps I was a victory prize, a trophy, proof of his success. Perhaps he simply wanted a friend whose very nature he could mould, life to life, to his needs. And how cooperative I had been, how helpful and malleable, from the very first to the very last. Perhaps it was all of these things, in ever-changing measure.

  Whatever his motives, keep me close Vincent did. By 1943 he was a captain, and I was surprised to receive a transfer to his very specialist unit of what my major termed “boffins, bookworms and other oily chaps”. On arriving, I was less surprised to discover that Vincent Rankis had established himself as the go-to man for scientific know-how and expertise.

  “Why me?” I asked as he sat me down in his office. “Why did you request I join your unit? I’m a lawyer; I don’t know anything about this science stuff.”

  “Lieutenant,” he replied, for I was still a humble subaltern, “you do yourself a disservice. When I met you in Scotland, you seemed one of the most capable men I’ve ever met, and if this army needs anything, it needs capable men.”

  Indeed, I was of some use to the unit, for all its great scientific minds were clearly far too great to be bothered with such trivial details as whether there were enough blankets in the barracks, supplies for the canteen and petrol coupons to get them to their meetings and back.

  “See, Harry!” exclaimed Vincent in our once-monthly administrative round-up of business. “I told you you’d fit right in here!”

  And so, while my old unit fought and died in the forests of France, I played secretary once again to Vincent Rankis and his rapidly growing private empire of brilliant minds. It was clear–politely yet obviously clear–that Vincent was already very rich, though the source of his wealth was not known among the men. However, as my role as administrative assistant grew, so did my access to information, including, eventually, the details of the account into which Vincent’s pay was regularly deposited. Armed with this, and an immaculate forgery of Vincent’s signature, it was a simple enough matter to head down to the bank and request a complete history of Vincent’s transactions–for the tax men, you know how it is. I was lucky. In my last life my exhaustive research into Vincent’s finances had revealed only a tangled web of offshore accounts and intricate security procedures which had sent even the finest forensic accountants wheeling off around the world as they traced this piece of income to a sauna in Bangkok, or tha
t to an Indian restaurant in Paris, or thought perhaps they’d found something in a line of credit which ended in the grocery department of Harrods.

  This time, with Vincent barely nineteen years old (but doing a passable impression of twenty-five), he hadn’t had either the time or the opportunity to spread his finances far and wide, and a few bank details were enough for me to trace his finances back to the 1920s themselves. I had to fight to keep both my excitement and my activities secret. Living in such close proximity to Vincent, I knew I dared not keep any physical record of my activity in the base so spent my time on leave in a small bed and breakfast in Hastings, poring over every line by light turned down low against the blackout curtain, before burning every document I’d found and washing the ashes away. The pattern of his behaviour was in many ways predictable. Whenever he fell short, he gambled, and like all good kalachakra knew the victors of certain key races and bet heavily enough to ensure a good return but widely enough to raise no questions in any one particular location as to how this boy could do so well. However, one detail did catch my eye: during the earliest years in which I could trace his movements, they seemed focused around the south-west of London, and leaving aside the supplementary income provided by the races, he appeared to receive a regular income of sixteen pounds a month up to the start of the war. While there were plenty of innocent explanations for this, I could not help but suspect, could not but begin to believe, that what I was seeing was an allowance from a relative. Perhaps a very close relative indeed.

  It wasn’t much, but it was a place to start looking, quietly–so quietly.

  When VE Day came, I, in my capacity as the only one in Vincent’s unit capable of organising a piss-up in a brewery, did exactly that, perhaps as a petty reminder to my peers that, for all they were brilliant, bright, intelligent and quite possibly the future of scientific development, they were nevertheless incapable of running their own day-to-day lives without having someone to organise it for them. Two weeks later Vincent stuck his head round the door of my office. “Harry,” he exclaimed, “I’m off out to meet a bird. Could you pop these in the post?”

  A great fistful of envelopes was given to me. I glanced at the addresses briefly: MIT, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, the Sorbonne. “No problem, sir.”

  “For God’s sake, Harry, surely we can stop using ‘sir’ now?”

  When he was gone, I steamed open one of the letters. Inside, written on thick yellow paper with no watermark, was a very detailed, very well drawn diagram illustrating the uses, functionality and specifications of a microwave magnetron.

  I thought long and hard that night about what to do with these documents. They were dangerous, deadly and postal distribution was precisely the same method as Vincent had deployed in his last life for kick-starting technological growth across the globe, only this time–this time he wasn’t limiting himself to ideas from twenty or thirty years in the future; within those envelopes were ideas that wouldn’t be expounded for at least sixty years.

  In the end, I went to Charity for advice.

  We met in Sheringham, a small town on the north Norfolk coast, where the fish was always fresh and you half imagined the catch had been blasted in across the shingle by the sheer force of the waves which pounded its shore–a salt-sprayed thundering that chafed the lips, dried the eyes and crystallised every hair within a few minutes of exposure to its roar. She was getting old, my ally, and would soon be looking at death. I was on the verge of being discharged from the army, still stuck in my uniform for a few more days, holding tightly on to my hat between my gloved fists as the wind howled in from a thick grey sky.

  “Well?” she demanded, as we strode first one way, then the other, along the few yards of beach that weren’t foaming white. “What do you have for me now?”

  “Letters,” I replied. “He’s sending out letters again, to all the universities and engineering institutions of the world. Not just America this time–Europe, Russia, China–anywhere with resources and good minds. There’s diagrams for Scud missiles, illustrations of wave-particle duality, analysis of heat-resistant orbital shields, analysis of weight-to-thrust ratios for orbital escape…”

  She waved me to silence with one white-gloved hand. “I think I see the problem, Harry.”

  “He’s told me to post them.”

  “Are you going to?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I wanted to see you.”

  “I’m flattered that you value my opinion so highly.” She was waiting for me to talk it through, work it out for myself, so I did.

  “If I post these, history will change again. Faster than ever before. I can’t predict it, don’t know what will happen, but these letters will revolutionise science, cut out forty to fifty years of technological development. The Clubs of the future—”

  “The Cronus Club is already in turmoil, Harry. Last time Vincent did this, history itself was changed. Do not delude yourself into thinking it will be turned back by a few lifetimes.”

  “If I don’t post them, my cover with Vincent will be blown. He’ll realise that I can remember everything, and we’ll be no closer to his point of origin.”

  “I still say we should just slice his ears off. It worked in the old days.”

  “He won’t talk.”

  “You seem so sure of that, Harry.”

  “I didn’t, did I?”

  She pursed her lips, turned her head away from another great blast of spray across the shore. “I cannot make this choice for you. If you don’t post the letters, then we’ll have no choice but to pick Vincent up at once and attempt to interrogate the truth out of him. If you do post the letters, then, for this life at least, the world will once again dissolve into chaos. Order will crumble, the natural course of things will decline, and mankind will not be the same again. But…”

  “But I will still have my position with Vincent, and still have a chance at tricking him into trusting me with his secrets.”

  “Quite. I do not know this man. I have never met him, nor can I risk meeting him in case he knows who and what I am. I have no doubt that he’s already perfecting the technology for the Forgetting, just in case he should encounter more members of the Cronus Club. The choice is yours, Harry. Only you can judge the best way to end this.”

  “You’ve been a great help,” I grumbled.

  She shrugged. “This is your crusade, Harry, not mine. Do what you think fit. The Cronus Club… we can no longer judge. We have had our chance.”

  The following morning I posted the letters and caught the first train out of town before I had a chance to change my mind.

  Chapter 79

  After the war Vincent once again established himself as an all-purpose “investor”. He didn’t have any particular company to front for this, but trotted around the globe as an extremely wealthy enthusiast, picking up bits here and there of whatever it was that seemed to interest him. And I was his personal private secretary.

  “I want to keep you close, Harry,” he explained. “You’re just so good for me.”

  As his secretary, I had access to information far beyond anything I’d possessed in my last life. Documents he didn’t even know existed were continually fed to me from banks, universities, CEOs, charities looking for investment, governments and brokers, and Vincent, in an omission which I can only class as a fatal mistake, didn’t even bother to check on them. He was used to me: I was his pet, utterly reliable, utterly dependent, utterly harmless. I was subservient, grateful that he was paying me so much to do so little, excited by the people I met, and, if asked my job title, would reply proudly that I was not a secretary at all, but rather a corporate executive working for Mr Rankis, a fix-it man travelling across the globe with him, living the high life, following in his voluminous coat tails. He treated me very well, both as an employee and as a friend, once again buying my affection through the usual pattern of free dinners–holidays–golf–and gods how I loathed golf–and the regular trips he paid for us to take to his favourite club
in the Caribbean. These were all part of my corruption, and so I went along with it to show willing. I like to tell myself I could have been a good golfer, if only I’d given a damn, but perhaps the simple truth is that there are some skills which experience cannot buy.

  We shared stories of the war, friends, acquaintances, drinks; slept in the same compartment on overnight trains; sat side by side on the planes across the Atlantic; swapped seats as we drove from meeting to meeting up and down first the east, then the west coast of America. We stood together above Niagara Falls, one of the few sights on this planet which, no matter how perfectly I recall it, never fails to take my breath away, and when working together on business trips, our hotel rooms were adjoining, a connecting door between so we could share a midnight drink when inspiration struck. Many people assumed we were lovers, and I considered what I would do if Vincent proposed the same. Having been through so much, the prospect of sleeping with him was nothing to me at all, and I would have done it without a second thought. The question that remained over the matter was whether I could justify it based on the persona I was currently wearing of Harry August, nice boy from Leeds, raised in an age when homosexuality wasn’t merely illegal, it was entirely taboo. If the matter came up, I resolved to have a good, public, old-fashioned crisis of religious faith about it, and if the question still remained, I would succumb only after a great deal of guilt and quite possibly an unhappy love affair. There was no point making things too easy for him. Thankfully, the issue never arose, though everyone, including myself, seemed to be waiting for the moment. Vincent’s attitude to love, it appeared, was, as he himself had stated, strictly therapeutic. Destructive passion was foolish; irrational desire was a waste of time, and his mind was always on higher things.