Tom looked at the ground. He hoped Blueskin did not mean what he said but did not dare look into his face in case he did. He liked it here. He felt safe with the Tar Man—at least most of the time.
The Tar Man picked up one of the slim books which Anjali had left for them and threw it to Tom. He picked up the other one himself, and master and apprentice sat on the leather sofa side by side and read together as they did most afternoons. Sometimes they practiced texting each other on their mobile phones, but today Anjali wanted them to focus on their reading. The Tar Man complied, for he realized that being illiterate in the twenty-first century was not an option. They took it in turns to read a line, the Tar Man needing to follow the words with his finger. Tom was already a much better reader than the Tar Man, but as he knew this annoyed his master, he tried to disguise it by speaking slowly.
“Mum was c-r-oss and D-ad was cr-oss but B-illy did not c-are,” read the Tar Man.
Then it was Tom’s go: “ ‘You must not pull your sister’s hair. It is not kind,’ said Dad.”
“You h-ave made her c-ry, B-illy…. What are you go-ing to say to her?”
“Sorry, Mum. Sorry, Dad,” read Tom. “I will say to Amy that I will—”
“Drop her from the roof and that will cure her of her whining,” quipped the Tar Man. “Confound this nursery fare. Where is the intrigue? Where is the wit? Where are the fulsome wenches?”
The Tar Man grabbed the remote control and the balcony window started to glide open. As soon as the opening was wide enough he flung the reading primer high up into the air with all his force. It spiraled up toward the dark blue heavens and then it started its descent. Tom dashed out into the freezing air and his delighted gaze followed the arc the book made as it dropped twenty-one floors toward the river. Red sunlight illuminated his face, and his green eyes, fringed with thick lashes, sparkled. He was already less painfully thin than he had been and it suited him. The Tar Man joined him on the spacious balcony and together they watched the tiny speck of white as it landed on the gray river below and floated away.
“Who hit you last night?” asked the Tar Man suddenly.
Tom’s cheeks colored. “No one!”
“Was it Anjali?”
Tom would not answer and cringed in discomfort.
“Don’t lie to me, lad! You still bear the mark. Someone slapped you—and hard. Only a girl would do such a thing.”
“No! You are mistaken.”
The Tar Man grabbed hold of Tom’s ear and twisted it until he cried out.
“Tell me! I need to know that I can trust her!”
“It was nothing, Blueskin. I swear to you….”
The Tar Man released his ear a fraction.
“I followed her to the dancing club she goes to. There are some evil-looking fellows and the streets are dark. She wanted Tony to dance with her, but he was with another girl. Anjali was crying and I pulled her away, but she didn’t want to come.”
“So she slapped you….”
“Yes. Only a little.”
The Tar Man let go of his ear. “Then you should have slapped her back.”
The memory of the night before came flooding back. Tom stuck his nails into the palms of his hands. It had been so dark in the club, and so very hot. The dance floor was a snake’s nest of bodies writhing to the music that pounded in his ears and in his chest. Powerful lights flicked on and off, generating intermittent blue-white snapshots of gyrating figures. He felt giddy, disorientated. This barrage on his senses was too much for him and he longed to escape into the cold and the quiet of the night. He saw Anjali at the other side of the steamy room. He could not hear a word, yet it was clear that she was making a fool of herself. He had to stop her. The shifting throng of dancers obscured his view, and as he beat a path through the crowd, he caught fleeting glimpses of Anjali shouting and crying, her long, metallic earrings reflecting the pulsing lights like miniature beacons. Her hands were clenched into tight fists and she was shaking her head. Observing her dispassionately were Tony and his new girlfriend and a gaggle of his mates, all of whom had stopped dancing to stare at Anjali’s performance.
As he drew close he heard Tony shout out: “What do I care if Vega Riaza can walk through walls? So can a bulldozer.” He saw Tony’s mates double up with laughter. “You think you’re so cool, Anjali. Take it from me. You’re not.”
Tom darted in front of Tony and his new girlfriend and grabbed hold of Anjali’s hot hand.
“Come, Miss Anjali. Best come with me.”
Anjali looked down at him, incandescent with rage. She tried to pull away her hand, but he would not let go. Tom heard the howls of derisive laughter. He read contempt and loathing and humiliation in her eyes.
“Get away from me, you little creep!” she screamed.
“Please, Miss Anjali! These are not your friends….”
Anjali wrenched away her hand and slapped him so hard he staggered backward a step. Slowly he raised his head and met her gaze.
“Will you come now?” he asked.
She took a step toward him and delivered another stinging slap to the other cheek.
There were guffaws of laughter. All he knew was that he had to save her from this. He held out his hand toward her. She knocked it to one side and struck him again. Slap! Tom’s jaw was knocked first to one side and then the other. Slap! Slap! Slap!
“You’re mental, you are,” commented Tony. He turned his back on Anjali and moved away with his entourage.
Finally Anjali stopped, ashamed and defeated.
“Get out!” she shouted at Tom. “Why didn’t you fight back? What’s wrong with you?”
Tom fled into the cooling rain and ran through the dark streets without stopping. Then he slumped down onto the pavement under the orange glow of a street lamp, his heart as bruised and numb as his poor face, and he let his mouse crawl up his sleeve and through his tousled hair and slide down the sheet of tears that covered his cheeks.
“Does she have a loose tongue when she talks with her friends?” asked the Tar Man.
“No! Anjali knows how to hold her tongue. You need have no fear on that account!”
The Tar Man scrutinized Tom’s face.
“You think I am wrong to doubt her. She is no squeaker, of that I am certain, yet no more is she as careful as she needs to be, and perchance one day she’ll find that out to her cost—or ours—and that makes me uneasy. But I do not deny that she is a good guide. I have been pleased with her efforts.”
The Tar Man paced up and down the balcony. A black-headed gull landed on the handrail and immediately took off again when it realized it had company. It flew, squawking, toward the sun. Master and apprentice watched the bird’s strong wings beating a course downriver. The whup-whup-whup of a helicopter made them look overhead. It was a police helicopter. The Tar Man recollected his dramatic entry into the future and smiled a broad smile of satisfaction. “I hope you have the bottom to attend me when I take delivery of the flying machine.”
Tom gulped. “Will we fly in it?”
“Why else would I buy one, numbskull! We will see the world as a bird sees it! What say you we follow the course of the Thames to the sea?”
“Yes, Blueskin,” Tom said doubtfully. “I think I should like to see the oceans….”
Suddenly the Tar Man laughed and thumped Tom on the back.
“See how far we have come so soon! The view from this place is very pleasing to me…. Life is sweet in the future, eh, Tom?”
“Yes, Blueskin, it is very good.”
“And as for our friend Anjali, stick hard by her for a while. Keep her out of harm’s way. The lovesick make mistakes—and I do not wish to have the trouble of being obliged to find another guide.”
“You’re a good dog,” said Sergeant Chadwick. Molly had sat at his feet all this time without even a whimper. He leaned down and patted her golden head and she looked up at him with her dark, soulful eyes, pleased to have some attention. Sergeant Chadwick wriggled his
toes. They were fast becoming numb. He stamped his feet on the frozen lawn and rubbed his hands together. He could see his breath. If he had known he was going to be standing guard over an oversized fridge, he would have brought some gloves and a hat, not to mention a flask of sweet tea. It had been nearly an hour since they had apprehended Kate Dyer’s father and Dr. Pirretti. They had been unloading equipment from a Land Rover into the garden of this chocolate box cottage on the outskirts of Bakewell for a reason which had yet to be ascertained.
When questioned, the scientists had not been exactly forth-coming. However, when Detective Inspector Wheeler had threatened to arrest them for obstructing the police in their inquiries, Dr. Dyer had turned to his American colleague and said: “Anita, if it’s a choice between telling him or not going after the children, I vote we tell him….”
Dr. Pirretti had argued vigorously with her colleague while the bemused Inspector Wheeler, barely able to get a word in edgewise, tried to remind them that they were, in point of fact, trespassing on this resident’s property. He also pointed out that, after being copied in on some of the curt missives from NASA concerning her recent conduct, he doubted that she possessed the requisite authorization to be carting NASA-funded equipment all over Derbyshire.
There had then been a long silence during which Sergeant Chadwick had tried to interpret a series of meaningful glances between the scientists. Eventually it was Dr. Pirretti who spoke.
“Against my better judgement, Inspector, we’re going to let you in on a little secret that will blow all of your theories about the missing children straight out of the sky.” Then she had glared at Sergeant Chadwick. “This information is for your ears only, Inspector, and is given strictly on the condition that, under formal questioning, should it arise, we will always deny all knowledge….”
Sergeant Chadwick had been unceremoniously relegated to guard duty. Sergeant Chadwick’s gaze strayed repeatedly over to the steamed-up windows of the Land Rover. The Inspector sat in the driver’s seat, twisting his neck around awkwardly to look at Dr. Dyer and Dr. Pirretti. Mostly the Inspector listened, bushy eyebrows raised in amazement, staring at them incredulously. At one point he just sat there with an astonished grin on his face. Whatever they were telling him, it was certainly compelling stuff. What was all this about? Molly yawned noisily.
“I know just how you feel.”
Suddenly Detective Inspector Wheeler was out of the car and was buttoning up his heavy Harris tweed coat. He bounded over to Sergeant Chadwick. “Right, Sergeant, I need you to come with me.”
The Inspector’s Scottish accent always seemed to intensify when he was excited.
“You’re looking cheerful, Inspector.”
“Aye, Sergeant, I am. I am indeed.”
They opened the cottage’s wrought iron gate and walked up the front path. When they could no longer be seen from the road, Detective Inspector Wheeler gave a little leap and punched the air triumphantly.
“I knew there had to be a missing piece to this puzzle! But never, never in a million years did I think it was going to be this!”
For a moment Sergeant Chadwick thought he was going to hug him.
“But I take it that you’re not allowed to tell me….”
The Inspector tapped the side of his nose. “Don’t fret, Sergeant, I’ll put you out of your misery later….”
It took a while for the bleary-eyed occupants of the cottage to come to the door, and they were none too pleased to be informed that their home was needed for urgent police business for a couple of hours and that Sergeant Chadwick would assist them in vacating the property without delay. As soon as the Sergeant had driven off with his unhappy passengers, Inspector Wheeler helped Dr. Dyer and Dr. Pirretti carry the antigravity machine into the three-hundred-year-old cottage that in former centuries used to be known as Hawthorn Cottage. Moving the machine indoors had, in fact, been Inspector Wheeler’s idea. Since, from past experience, it could be assumed that Dr. Dyer would be in an unconscious state for some time once he had, with any luck, arrived in 1763, it made sense for him to recover indoors rather than lying in the garden for any ne’er-do-well to see.
Dr. Dyer requested that his two assistants leave the cottage before he attempted to start up the antigravity machine. So Dr. Pirretti and Inspector Wheeler stood outside the sitting-room window at what Dr. Dyer suggested would be a safe distance while he keyed in the security code and checked the settings for the twentieth time. Dr. Dyer had said his good-byes to the children the previous night and told them to be good and that he would see them again very soon, but, as he waved to his wife who stood at the kitchen door refusing to cry, he saw Sam, Issy and Alice, Sean, and even little Milly peeping out from behind the curtains. Why, he thought, did this have to happen to us?
His finger hovered over the button and he spoke a silent prayer. Molly lay at his feet and Dr. Dyer stroked her soft ears. “Good dog,” he said. “You found her the last time; let’s see if you can do it again.”
In a state of high excitement the Inspector peered through the window at the antigravity machine, incongruous against the cottage’s bare-brick walls and slate inglenook. Dr. Dyer smiled at Dr. Pirretti. She smiled back at him and gave him the thumbs-up sign. Then he pressed the button. For several seconds Inspector Wheeler was aware of something happening to the surface of the machine—it seemed to be dissolving, liquefying, transforming…. The hairs rose on the back of Inspector Wheeler’s neck. Then Dr. Dyer, too, appeared to lose some of his opaqueness, and an instant later no trace remained of either man, machine, or Golden Labrador. Dr. Pirretti let her face drop forward against the pane of glass in relief.
“Thank God,” she said.
Detective Inspector Wheeler was trembling. Dr. Pirretti turned her head a fraction to look at him.
“So now you know,” she said.
Tucked away in a quiet corner of a country pub that evening, Inspector Wheeler drank bitter lemon and gave Sergeant Chadwick a blow-by-blow account of the incredible story that Dr. Pirretti and Dr. Dyer had told him and what he had seen happen to the antigravity machine.
“Are you sure you should be telling me this, sir?”
“I’m not telling you anything, Sergeant. You are like the three brass monkeys: blind, deaf, and dumb. I happen to be talking to myself. You happen to be sitting next to me.”
Inspector Wheeler’s relief was palpable. During his talk with Dr. Dyer and Dr. Pirretti, all the missing pieces of the case which had tortured him for so long appeared in their entirety, as if summoned by magic, slipping into place and revealing the complete, astounding, picture. His narrative was punctuated with exclamations from Sergeant Chadwick: “You’ve got to be pulling my leg!” and “Time travel!” and “I don’t believe I’m hearing this….”
When the Inspector finally ran out of steam, they sat in silence for a while, sipping their drinks and aware for the first time of the clinking of glasses and the hiss of the wood fire and hum of conversation. The cozy scene inside the pub somehow increased the sense of unreality they were both feeling. After a while Sergeant Chadwick started to chuckle quietly and commented: “The fancy dress thing had really been getting to me…. Who’d have thought the explanation was so much more logical than all the incredible theories we’d been coming up with.”
“You had been coming with!”
“And the Dyer girl appearing between the goalposts at the school . . . And the photocopying room incident at Lincoln’s Inn Fields …”
“And how they vanished from the laboratory without trace and with no witnesses,” said Inspector Wheeler. “Not to mention Kate Dyer’s convenient loss of memory and Mr. Schock’s so-called ‘holiday.’ Do you remember how we struggled to come up with a reason for them scraping off the graffiti at the Dyer girl’s school, Sergeant? Turns out she’d left a message—‘Kate Dyer wants to come home—July 1763.’ It was the first evidence they had found that the children had gone back in time.”
“No wonder the NASA scientis
ts wanted to keep a lid on it. They’ll never manage it, though. Not something like this. If they managed to invent it, someone else will work out how to do it eventually. And I don’t rate Dr. Dyer’s chances of finding the kids and Mr. Schock, either. Talk about a needle in a haystack….”
“No. Indeed.”
“It’s a brave thing that he’s doing but then, when it’s your own kid I guess you’d do anything….”
Inspector Wheeler suddenly sat upright and gripped Sergeant Chadwick’s arm.
“But I was forgetting—there’s something else I haven’t told you! When Peter Schock got left behind in 1763, his place was taken by a certain eighteenth-century criminal called the Tar Man. A pretty scary guy by all accounts who—”
Sergeant Chadwick’s face lit up.
“Who doesn’t by any possible chance have a crooked neck and a scar down one cheek and was last seen riding a horse down Oxford Street?”
“The very same.”
Sergeant Chadwick thumped the table and whooped. Inspector Wheeler put a crumpled five-pound note on the table.
“And if you get me another drink, Sergeant, I might be persuaded to tell you how he got that crooked neck of his….”
Inspector Wheeler was listening to a comedian on the radio as he headed for home. The eleven o’clock news bulletin came on, and he was not in the mood to hear it. It occurred to him that it would make a pleasant change to go back to the eighteenth century and escape mass communication and with it the daily diet of war and political maneuvering and gloomy economic, not to mention gloomy weather, forecasts. Actually, he did not want to know that a thick bank of cloud was moving over the British Isles and that it would be several days before the sun was able to break through. Ignorance, he thought, is becoming an increasingly rare and desirable commodity.
Driving back through the deserted country roads after such a memorable and exciting day, Inspector Wheeler wanted to listen to some music. Something haunting and beautiful to soothe him and stop his agitated brain thinking any more about time travel and blurring and the Tar Man. He slowed down to a crawl and ferreted about in the glove compartment, chucking CDs and empty cases behind him onto the backseat to sort out later. Even as he threw them over his shoulder, he already knew that he would not find the time to finish the job. His car was, like his life, strewn with the detritus of good intentions. He could do with an antigravity machine, he reflected. It would be good to think you could have another bite at the cherry….
Gideon 02 -The Time Thief Page 28