by Winona Kent
Assuming he would find a similar gas mask within, Shaun was surprised when he opened the lid. Inside was a collection of objects, none of which had the slightest thing in common with gas masks.
The first of these objects was a bracelet, constructed of pieces of coloured agate—terra cotta, black, mossy green, charcoal, bisque pink—shaped and polished and joined with silver links.
The second was a ring, of plain silver.
The third….
Shaun stopped, and stared.
The third item was a locket, the kind that might be worn on the end of a chain.
He lifted it out of the box, wondering if he might be mistaken.
No. There was no mistake.
It was an oval pinchbeck locket, made to hold a miniature portrait, or a cutting of hair. Its outside case was exquisitely detailed.
He coaxed it open, holding his breath.
The locket had cost him a fortune, but his love had known no bounds. He had given it to Jemima for her twenty-first birthday. Inside, behind the oval of glass, he had included strands of his own hair, a keepsake to which he hoped Jemima might add a snippet of her own.
Three months later, she had forsaken him, and had, instead, chosen Cornelius Quinn.
Shaun had supposed the locket had been discarded, as he had never set eyes on it again. Yet here it was. He knew it was the same locket, because on the back he had arranged to have their initials engraved. SPD and JEB.
The initials were still there, testimony to his undying love.
Shaun stared at the little collection of jewellery he had placed upon the Persian carpet, and remembered the conversation he had held with Mrs. Collins, when they were travelling to London aboard the train. The subject of their conversation had been the Middlehurst Slasher. He mined his memory to recall the names of the three unfortunate women. Annie Black… Mary Potter… and Matilda Ferryman.
He investigated further, and discovered a very old folded piece of newspaper. He opened it with care.
The story was immediately familiar to him. It was the unhappy tale of Angela Bailey, who had lived on the same road as Betty in 1940, whose body had been discovered in the rubble left by a bomb just before he and Mrs. Collins had arrived. According to Miss Bailey’s mother, she had been wearing a brooch, made of gold, with three small flowers.
Shaun looked in the box. There it was.
And there was a second newspaper story. It concerned the disappearance of Miss Deirdre Allsop, who worked in a sweet shop in Balham and lived with her invalid aunt. Miss Allsop’s body was discovered upon Mitcham Common earlier in the year, in August. Her throat had been cut, and her earrings, which she had borrowed from her aunt, had been taken.
Shaun looked once more in the box, and found the earrings. They were not the sort of earrings that women wore in the present, which were poked through holes in the earlobes, the very thought of which made Shaun feel quite unwell. These were the sort of earrings that he had seen for sale in Antiques Olde and New, which were fixed to the ears by means of tiny clasps.
Shaun put everything back inside the gas mask box and closed the lid, and then placed it back inside the suitcase.
How had this case come into the possession of Mrs. Collins’s grandmother?
Shaun considered the possibilities, and arrived at the only conclusion which made sense. If, indeed, Silas Ferryman was the Middlehurst Slasher, then the case must have belonged to him. The dark-haired gentleman who was Betty Singleton’s lodger.
He placed the suitcase beside the armchair and arranged the pillow so that it would afford him the most comfort for the night. He dragged the hassock under his legs and feet. He switched on the small electrical heater, then took off his long black overcoat and placed it over himself. He turned off the lamp.
He was exhausted, but his mind was at odds with sleep.
From his birth until now, he had never been alone.
He had been born in a little house in Christchurch, and had lived there with his mother and father and six brothers and sisters until his father, made redundant by the untimely death of his aged employer, had found work as head groom at Monsieur Duran’s manor in Stoneford. Shaun’s entire family had packed up its belongings and moved ten miles to the east to accommodate the arrangement. And after his father had died—the unfortunate recipient of a horse’s hoof to the head—Shaun had taken over his position, moving into a room of his own in the manor’s servants’ quarters, surrounded by maids and a butler, a cook, and a gardener.
He had willingly left them all behind when he had taken up residence in Mrs. Collins’s cottage, within sight of the manor, but separated by nearly 200 years.
She had become his family. She was his reason for being.
Here and now, and for the very first time in his life, there was no one who cared whether he came or went, or lived or died.
Here and now, if he were to take the train to Stoneford, and if Mrs. Collins’s cottage even existed, he would find other people in residence, and no trace at all of the woman he adored.
Shaun’s mind tumbled with questions: what had happened to cause him to wake up in this different future? And when?
Had it occurred in those forgotten moments between the time that the bomb had dropped near the hotel in 1940, causing him to lose consciousness, and his coming back to awareness, sitting in the comfortable armchair in the hotel’s lobby in the present?
He had no idea.
And now his mind was flooding with memories of Mrs. Collins. Her fright at discovering that he had placed the plastic kettle upon the fire in order to boil water for tea. The way she’d opened all of the windows and doors to let the pungent smoke escape. Their excursion to the shop to purchase a new kettle, and also two new and very fine saucepans, which Shaun had convinced Mrs. Collins were the accepted signal of betrothal between a gentleman and his intended in 1825… until she had looked it up on her iPad.
But she had not returned the saucepans to the shop.
She had used them immediately, and had invited him into the kitchen to help, her patient instructions concerning cookery in the twenty-first century always accompanied by a loving embrace and a reassuring kiss.
Their last embrace, at the top of Betty’s stairs, after the bomb had dropped on the house across the road.
The last kiss they had shared, its sweetness and its passion.
He shut his eyes, and in the silent darkness, could not prevent himself from weeping.
• • •
He did not own a timepiece, but he knew, instinctively, that his sleep had been brief and troubled. And now, he was wide-awake again. Something had woken him up. Something urgent. Perhaps it had been a dream. He wracked his brain to try and remember the ephemeral images that had fled like naughty children the moment he had opened his eyes.
Yes. There. He closed his eyes again and focused his mind on the very end of the filmy dream-thought, fixing it, preventing its dissolution.
It had not been a dream. Dreams melted away with wakefulness.
What had woken Shaun up was a fragment of memory, sparkling like a bright shard of glass. And now he was aware of more glittering pieces, large and small, scattered about him, that he could pick up and fit together to construct a complete pane, a window into his mind.
He remembered.
He was in Balham Underground Station. He was on the northbound platform and he was running. He could see the big old-fashioned clock, and its hands….
It was two minutes past eight.
Behind him, he heard the sound of a massive explosion, and the tunnel roof collapsed in an avalanche of mud and water and gravel and sewage. The platform plunged into darkness. All around him, he could hear the screams of women and children, and the roar of water and gravel and pieces of the roadway above falling through the hole in the top of the tunnel.
And then… suddenly, he was no longer trapped in the collapsing station. It seemed as if he had blinked and everything had changed. The memory was there, as clear
as if he had lived it, all over again.
It was no longer nighttime, but day, and he was standing on the pavement outside a building, and the noise from the traffic on the roadway beside him was deafening.
He recalled staring, bewildered, at the modern cars and the streamlined buses and the men and women who were walking along the pavement, going about their daily business, texting and talking on their clever devices.
He remembered turning around to face the building behind him, with its large pavement-side windows draped in smart blue and white striped awnings.
And he recalled the realization that he was standing directly outside the Bedford Square Hotel, and that it was no longer 1940, and that his arm was dripping blood, and that he was absolutely alone.
Had his own accidental abilities caused this to happen? Shaun was unsure. He had travelled in time twice before, each excursion at the behest of something or someone else. This was different. This had felt different. As the lights had arced out on the station platform, he recalled that he had wished himself away… willed himself away… and the last thing he remembered picturing in his mind was the Anderson shelter in Nana Betty’s back garden, with Mrs. Collins, on the day they had arrived in Balham for the funeral.
He had most certainly not been thinking about that hotel, in the centre of London.
Whatever machinations or influences he had drawn upon to deliver himself there had drained him. He remembered his head spinning, his arm hurting, and that he felt very faint.
“You all right, mate?” a stranger had asked him.
“I fear,” Shaun had said, leaning upon the man, “that if I do not soon locate a seat, the pavement will shortly become acquainted with my face.”
“Come this way,” the fellow had replied, guiding him through the hotel’s front doors and into the lounge, just off the lobby. “Sit here.”
Shaun had sunk into one of the chairs, and was immediately attended to by a gentleman in a waistcoat with stripes that matched the awnings outside.
“Can you get him some water?” the helpful man had asked.
“Certainly, sir. A bottle of San Pellegrino?”
“A glass of ordinary water will suffice,” Shaun had said. “From the tap.”
“As you wish.”
The gentleman in the striped waistcoat had seemed somewhat less attentive as he’d delivered Shaun’s request to a nearby barman.
“You’ve got something nasty going on with your arm there. Hang on.” The helpful man had disappeared and was back, moments later, with a wad of paper towels, some wet, some dry. These, he had applied to Shaun’s wound. “Just keep pressing down with your hand to stop the bleeding. You’ll be OK, yeah?”
“I believe so,” Shaun had said. “Many thanks.”
“Not to worry. I’ll be off. I’m sorry to have to leave you but I’m late for an appointment. Take care of yourself. See a doctor.”
“I will,” Shaun had said.
And it seemed to him now, thinking back, that he had drifted off into a kind of sleep, and when he had opened his eyes, he had found himself alone in the lounge, with absolutely no recollection of anything that had come before.
And so some of the glittering shards were, at last, glued together. Not all of them. But enough to give him an idea of how he had come to be inhabiting this new reality. It was like staring through a pane of cracked glass at an unfamiliar room.
He could remember the ceiling of Balham Underground station collapsing behind him as he ran… but nothing before that. His last memory prior to the Underground was of seeking shelter in the cellar of the Bedford Square Hotel, and of a bomb dropping. And then… nothing more.
Chapter Eighteen
“You must forgive my untidy manners,” Mr. Deeley said in between gulps of tea and hungry mouthfuls of hot soup. “I have not eaten since lunchtime yesterday.”
“We’ll forgive you anything, Mr. Deeley,” Charlie said, sitting beside him at the table in Betty’s dining room, holding onto his hand, never wanting to let go of it again. “What happened? I could have sworn you were dead. You weren’t breathing. You were dead.”
“I cannot say for certain,” Mr. Deeley replied, pausing midspoon. “I have no recollection of anything beyond the noise of the bomb outside, and the ceiling collapsing on top of me. When I woke up, I was lying upon a very hard table. And this was attached to my wrist.”
He took a slip of brown cardboard out of his pocket, and held it up so that Betty and Charlie could see. It was like a luggage tag, with a bit of string going through a hole at one end. All of the particulars concerning where and when he had been found were written on it, including the state he had been found in, and his name. The words DEAD BODY were quite prominently printed across the top.
“And I was exceedingly cold, and my head hurt profoundly. My only thought was to locate a place with more warmth. And so I climbed down from the table, and I let myself out. It seems to me that I then walked a considerable distance, along hallways and up stairs and then down again, until I found another room, into which there had been placed a number of chairs, occupied by people, the majority of whom seemed unwell or injured or otherwise indisposed. And that is where I sat, largely unnoticed, until I was able to return to a more sensible state.”
Mr. Deeley paused to finish his soup. Charlie poured him another cup of tea.
“I recall hearing, at a great distance, the sound of an air raid warning. And then also, at a great distance, the noise of more bombs. And the room where I was sitting shook a little. But those who surrounded me seemed unperturbed, and so I determined that I was safe there, for as long as I remained. I recall that a woman wearing some sort of uniform inquired whether I was well, and I replied in the affirmative, and then she left me to tend to a gentleman with a bandage on his hand. And then, after the bombing ceased, and the All Clear was sounded, I left the room and discovered a door which took me upstairs, and outside. It was, by that time, quite dark. I located a police constable, and asked him for directions to Balham. I believe he found me somewhat amusing. But he provided instructions, which I followed. And here I am. Slightly the worse for wear. But alive, nonetheless, and in very great need of a bed.”
“You may have your bed,” Betty replied, “and you may sleep to your heart’s content. We are both very glad of your safe return.”
Mr. Deeley paused once more, and placed his hand over his heart.
“This aches. It feels much like the time I was kicked by one of Monsieur Duran’s more disagreeable horses.”
“Chest compressions,” Charlie said. “I was doing CPR on you, until they dragged me away. I’m sure that’s what brought you back to life.”
“What on earth is CPR?” Betty inquired.
“Something I learned in a life-saving course in Stoneford. Cardiopulmonary resuscitation.” Charlie paused. “It’s quite a new technique.”
“It sounds jolly useful, however it’s done,” Betty said.
“I shall forgive you for the pain you inflicted,” Mr. Deeley said with a smile, “as it appears to have achieved what you intended. You held my heart in your hands, Mrs. Collins, and for this, I love you impossibly.”
He raised her fingers to his lips, and kissed them, with great tenderness.
“I love you impossibly, too, Mr. Deeley,” Charlie said, clasping his hand between her own.
“You two planning on getting married then?” Betty inquired.
“Yes,” Mr. Deeley replied, without hesitation.
“I’m definitely thinking about it,” Charlie added.
“Ah,” said Mr. Deeley. “Progress. I should arrange to die more often.”
Charlie laughed.
“Forgive me—I am overcome by weariness. Mrs. Collins, will you assist me up the stairs? I fear my legs may not have any strength left in them.”
Charlie helped him to his feet and stayed close behind him as he climbed the narrow staircase, one hand on his back, steadying him with a gentle push.
“The bi
g bedroom,” she said, steering him through the doorway. “I don’t want you to have anything more to do with that little room over the stairs.”
“Because it belongs to Silas Ferryman?” Mr. Deeley guessed.
“Exactly,” Charlie replied, plumping up a pillow on the big double bed.
“Are we in agreement, then, that the that the fair-haired gentleman who met us for lunch is the real Thaddeus Quinn? And that the man who was introduced to us as Betty’s lodger is the impostor?”
“I believe we are, Mr. Deeley.”
“I noticed he was not present downstairs, which I think peculiar, as the grocery shop where he is employed is not open on Sundays.”
“I don’t know where he is,” Charlie said. “Though I did see him yesterday. He followed us up to London, Mr. Deeley. He saw us talking to Thaddeus in the road outside Mrs. Crofton’s, after you’d rescued her children. And then, after the hotel was bombed, he followed me all the way to Strand and down into the tube station. He was very anxious to know what Thaddeus had said to us in the restaurant.”
“And did you tell him?”
“I did. But I wasn’t in any state of mind to think properly, Mr. Deeley. And then he said another young woman had been killed, before Angela Bailey. And this morning, Betty told me about a third murder, last night. I’m so afraid it was Violet, the waitress. Her body was found on a bomb site near the British Museum… which is very close to the hotel where we had lunch.”
Charlie plumped up a second pillow.
“And he had a suitcase with him, Mr. Deeley. He fell asleep while we were waiting for the air raid to end. I looked inside it.” She swallowed. “There was a box. And inside the box was some jewellery….” She paused, and then listed the items from memory. “A locket. A ring. A bracelet. A brooch. And a pair of earrings.”
“A locket,” Mr. Deeley said, thoughtfully. “And a ring… and a bracelet….”
“The jewellery missing from the victims of the Middlehurst Slasher. And Angela Bailey’s brooch was stolen from her body. And the other woman who was killed…her name was Deirdre Allsop. Her earrings were taken. And there were two newspaper clippings in the suitcase—one about Angela, the other about Deirdre.”