The Time Bubble Box Set 2

by Jason Ayres

  “That’s an inspired idea,” said Kent. “After I realised I couldn’t change history, I never really explored the possibility of solving mysteries within my own past. I had enough difficulty doing detective work in the present, to be honest. That’s probably why I am now unemployed.”

  “So what’s the legality of me poking around in his past affairs?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure of the exact legal position of it all, that’s more for lawyers than policemen. I do know that opening other people’s emails etc. can be considered an invasion of privacy, but that normally revolves around corporate spying or identity theft. As far as domestic cases go, in all my years in the force, no one ever came into the station and accused their husband or wife of such a thing. Besides, you’ll be in the other universe, so it doesn’t matter even if you do get caught snooping around somewhere you shouldn’t.”

  “Sounds like there’s nothing to worry about, then,” said Kay. “I can concentrate on the most important thing, which is to find the evidence in the first place.”

  “That’s another thing I meant to bring up – the question of evidence,” replied Kent.

  “Go on,” said Kay.

  “Well, even if you did find any evidence in the past, as I am sure you must know by now, you can’t bring it back to the present to use against him. It’s difficult to see what you can effectively do.”

  “What if I buried it or hid it somewhere, ready for me to dig up when I return?” she asked.

  “That wouldn’t work either,” he said. “You go back into Universe 2.0, remember? It wouldn’t be there for you to dig up in Universe 1.0.”

  “Of course it wouldn’t,” she said, mentally kicking herself for making such an obvious mistake. “You must think I’m a right numpty for that suggestion.”

  “Of course not,” said Kent. “You’re still learning and there’s a lot to get your head around. Time travel is a complicated business. It wasn’t until at least my third trip that I really got to grips with it all. I didn’t even realise you couldn’t change history until after the second. The angel didn’t bother to tell me that and I wasted a whole trip on a fruitless gambling spree thinking I could make myself rich.”

  “So it looks like I’m going to be relying on my memory,” said Kay. “That’s if I can even find anything.”

  “Your memory is all you’ve got. It’s the one thing you can take with you through time. What you need to do is to go back to a time when he won’t suspect that you know anything,” said Kent. “Pick a date before you broke up: that way you’ll be still living in your house and will have free rein to investigate.”

  “That makes sense,” replied Kay. “I can’t go round there now, he’s changed the locks. He did it the day after I moved out. That makes me even more suspicious that he’s got something to hide. He clearly didn’t want me going back there and poking around in his secret office. He pretty much locked me out of there even before we split up.”

  “You also don’t want him around while you are doing your snooping,” added Kent. “Make sure you pick a day when he won’t be there.”

  “That shouldn’t be too difficult,” replied Kay. “He was always off on his business trips. That’s if they even were business trips. Half the time I suspect he was holed up in some hotel somewhere with that tart, Lucy. I’m convinced he was having an affair with her for months, if not years, before he kicked me out. That’s something else I can probably find proof of, now I think about it.”

  “It sounds like you have got the makings of a decent plan there, then,” said Kent. “Part of me wishes I was coming with you. I miss travelling to the past now it’s over.”

  “Well, I will tell you all about it when I get back,” said Kay, happy with the way the conversation had gone. “Shall we go back to the bar now?”

  “Well, I really ought to be getting home,” replied Kent. “I told Debs I was only going out for one. But then, when have I ever done that? It hardly seems worth coming out just for one, does it? And it is Christmas, after all.”

  “Agreed,” said Kay. “I can only afford one more, though, that’s if I’m going to eat tomorrow.”

  “I’ll get you one,” he said. “That’s what friends are for.”

  Gratefully she accepted and they went to the bar. His comment about them being friends had given her a warm feeling inside because she knew he had really meant it. Real friends had been sorely lacking from her life for a long time, but now she knew for sure that she had at least one. Perhaps one was all you needed if they stood by you. She truly felt that in his case, he would.

  It was worth their while staying, purely for the entertainment value of seeing Andy’s botched attempt at resurrecting his rockstar past. He was actually doing quite well with his rendition of “Born to be Wild” until he got to the second chorus, tripped over the microphone stand and fell flat on his face, bringing an inevitable cheer from the crowd.

  “Look out for that one on YouTube tomorrow!” announced the DJ. “It’s not the first time he’s done that and it won’t be the last. Andy Green – we salute you – what a star!”

  Kay downed the remainder of her drink and got ready to leave. She went home feeling full of the joys of the season, looking forward to the challenge that lay ahead the next day.

  Chapter Thirteen

  February 2018

  By the time the angel appeared in the mirror the following morning, Kay was all prepared with the exact date she needed to go back to.

  Compared to her previous trips, this would be just a short hop in temporal terms. Her destination was February 14th 2018, a day she remembered well.

  It had been a Wednesday and she had been looking forward to going out for a meal with Alan, something they had done every Valentine’s Day since they had got together.

  Date nights such as these had become increasingly rare in recent years. Other than Valentine’s Day, about the only other time they went out for a meal was for their wedding anniversary. It was all a far cry from the wining and dining he had done to impress her in the early days.

  This year, the meal had not happened at all. A couple of days beforehand, he had announced that some major problem had come up with a wine supplier at work and he was going to have to fly to Paris the following day to sort it out.

  When she had suggested going with him, Alan had not looked happy. He had said that he would love to have her accompany him, but the company was having financial difficulties and he wouldn’t be able to justify a ticket for her on expenses. Besides, he would be spending all day in crisis meetings trying to resolve the problems, followed by dinner with the suppliers in the evenings. He wouldn’t be able to spend any time with her, so there was no point in her going.

  This had unsurprisingly turned out to be complete bullshit. By this time, Kay had already suspected him of having an affair, so disappearing off on Valentine’s Day set all sorts of alarm bells ringing in her head.

  A few weeks later he had told her he didn’t think the marriage was working out and had ordered her to move out. She was barely out of the door before he installed the hated Lucy in her place. It didn’t take a genius to work out it was her that he had been with in Paris that week.

  As for Kay, she stayed at home and spent Valentine’s Day watching old Bridget Jones movies on DVD. She didn’t hear a peep from Alan all day, and as for any sort of Valentine’s present, that was a joke. She didn’t even get a card.

  His absence that day was just what she needed to carry out her detective work. He would be nicely out of the way in Paris with that red-headed tart, enabling her to snoop at her leisure.

  As for Maddie, she would also be out of the way, spending half-term visiting some friends in London. At eighteen, she had inherited Kay’s adventurous streak, also expressing a desire to go travelling after her A levels. Kay just hoped she wouldn’t fall prey to another Glen, or even worse, another Alan.

  With the house to herself she could take her time and leave no stone unturned. It wasn’
t going to be one of the most exciting days of her life, but this time she was putting business before pleasure. This was about looking to the future, not reliving the past. If she found what she was looking for, then her unsuspecting victim would have his revenge served up cold just in time for Christmas.

  Kay didn’t bother with any preamble with the angel, telling her where she wanted to go straightaway. She soon found herself waking up in the past for the third time, in a third different bed. She was exactly where she had expected to be – in the house that had been her home until just a few months ago.

  How she missed this room. She hadn’t seen the inside of it since the day she had left. Her former home was a four-bedroom town house on one of the town’s new estates. Compared to the flat above McVie’s, it was a mansion. They had bought it three years before as a new build. After reserving the plot, they had the opportunity to have a say in all of the final specifications. That had allowed her to really put her stamp on it.

  Her bedroom, which on the plans had been described as the master bedroom, was an impressive size by modern standards, a spacious room where there was plenty of floor space, even with the king-size bed against the back wall.

  Every bit of furnishing in the room had been chosen and bought by her. Alan was not interested in those sorts of cosmetic details and had left her to get on with it. She had decorated and furnished it to what she felt was perfection. All of the furniture was made of pine, from the bed frame to the bedside tables. It was good, solid stuff, not like the cheap, flimsy rubbish they sold in some stores.

  The walls of the room were a pale lemon colour, with curtains to match. It was a similar shade to the dress she had recently worn in 1994. Yellow had always been her favourite colour.

  The massive windows along the left-hand side of the room made it wonderfully light, even on this winter morning. The whole of the opposite side of the room was taken up by a large, walk-in wardrobe, full of clothes. Most of these she hadn’t been able to take with her when she left. Alan had allowed her to pack just one suitcase before he escorted her off the premises the day she had left. When she tried to get back in a few days later, she discovered that he had changed the locks.

  It made her sick to the stomach to think that it was now Lucy who got to wake up in this room every day. It was Lucy who got to bounce up and down on top of her mattress on top of her husband. It was Lucy who had taken over her room, her territory and her man, like some foreign power mercilessly marching its army across her borders to annex her territory.

  Well, Lucy was in for a surprise, just as much as Alan was. Legally, Kay still owned half of this house, despite Alan’s best attempts to screw it out of her in the divorce. Yes, he may have earned far more than she had during the years they had been together, but there was more than a marriage to that.

  Kay had kept house for him, raised their daughter practically single-handedly, and done pretty much everything else for him since the day they had moved in together. In her eyes, that had just as much value as actual money being put on the table. His ducking and diving to get out of giving her any money in the divorce was unforgiveable. She was simply not going to let him get away with it.

  She dressed, freshened up, and went downstairs for breakfast. She noticed in the bathroom that the laundry basket was full and almost instinctively went to put a wash load on before remembering that she didn’t have to. She didn’t have to concern herself with any of that today. By 10am, she was ready to get started with what she had come here to do.

  Her focus would be entirely on one room on the middle floor of the house. With only three of them living there, four bedrooms had been a luxury. Alan had quickly suggested that one of them become his office for when he worked from home. This had seemed a perfectly reasonable suggestion at the time. They certainly didn’t need two guest bedrooms. The only time they ever had anyone to stay was when one of Maddie’s friends would come for a sleepover.

  It hadn’t taken him long to become extremely protective over his office. He moved in a desk, computer, filing cabinet and even a safe. When she questioned what he needed a safe for, he spun her some yarn about company policy when handling confidential documents.

  Not long after that he informed her that she didn’t need to clean the room: he would do it himself. It was the first time in his life he had ever offered to help with the housework. If that hadn’t been enough to make it crystal-clear he didn’t want her in there, a few weeks later he installed a lock on the door. She had never seen the key. He justified this as being in the interests of security. He said he couldn’t rule out rival firms breaking into the house and trying to steal company secrets.

  What utter rot, thought Kay now, as she stood in front of the locked door. Well, whatever secrets he was keeping in there, they were not going to remain secret much longer.

  The only way she was going to get in was by giving the door a good kicking. She hoped that, as it was only an internal door, it wouldn’t put up too much resistance. It always looked so easy when people did it on the telly. To make sure, she headed into Maddie’s bedroom and borrowed a big, heavy pair of boots that she insisted were all the fashion, though Kay thought they looked hideous.

  The boots proved to be very useful. They had steel toecaps and two good kicks at the lock got the door open. Although it was a pretty solid lock, he hadn’t installed it particularly well and it splintered easily.

  DIY was one of many things Alan wasn’t much good at. His argument was that he was a professional businessman who didn’t need to learn manual skills, as people like him paid other people to do those sorts of jobs. In reality, due to his incredible stinginess when it came to parting with cash, it had been Kay who had ended up doing most of the maintenance around the house.

  With the door open, Kay ventured forward eagerly into his man cave, wondering what she would find. At first glance, the room was nothing out of the ordinary. It was pretty much as it had looked when she had last seen it, which had been a good couple of years ago. He had been very meticulous in keeping her out of the office, even locking the door when he was working.

  She noticed right away how dusty all the surfaces were, including the laptop keyboard which was also covered in crumbs and flakes of what looked like dead skin. There were also several dead flies on the windowsill. So much for cleaning the room himself, she thought.

  Where should she start? She went for the laptop first. It was switched off so before she booted it up, she grabbed a couple of wipes and gave it a quick clean. There was no way she was touching that in its current state. Then she turned it on and waited, expecting to face some sort of password protection.

  Sure enough, the welcome screen was soon replaced by another asking for a PIN number. That was potentially easier than a password. She could have a reasonable stab at guessing it. What would he use?

  He had been born on the 25th October 1964, so she tentatively typed in 2510. To her amazement, the screen changed to the standard Windows opening screen. She had guessed correctly at the first attempt!

  She couldn’t believe it. What an absolute muppet! Why go to all this effort to secure the room and then use his birthday as his PIN? Even Kay, who wasn’t that tech-savvy, knew that you never used your date of birth as a PIN or a password. It was one of the first things that hackers would try.

  Cracking his code was going to make her job a whole lot easier. The laptop must be full of clues, especially if he had been labouring under the false premise that it was secure. So, what should she look for first?

  Her primary goal was to find out more about his financial affairs, in particular if he was hiding any money from her. However, she couldn’t resist checking out his Facebook first. He had left it logged in so she didn’t have to worry about a password.

  She went straight to his messages and found what she was looking for right away – a stash of private messages between him and Lucy. She steeled herself for what she might find as she opened it up. It was everything she was expecting: declaratio
ns of love, oodles of kisses, hearts and other emojis, mostly from her to him.

  As she scrolled up there was also a lot of dirty talk, describing what they were planning to do to each other. She didn’t bother reading all of it. There was too much for a start, an additional 1,384 messages above. Clearly the affair had been going on a long time. She decided to just skim through the last few, most of which related to their Paris plans.

  One phrase in his last message read:

  Haha, don’t worry, the stupid cow doesn’t suspect a thing. See you in the morning x x

  She had replied with a graphic of two champagne glasses clinking and lots of hearts.

  Kay was pleased that she didn’t feel in the remotest bit upset by reading any of this. That was good: it meant that she must be over him. She was also amused to see that Lucy’s messages were full of spelling mistakes and bad grammar. She was obviously not the brightest tool in the box.

  “Enjoy your champagne while you can,” she murmured. “This stupid cow is about to come back and bite you on the arse big time.”

  What else could she find? She opened up his emails and scrolled through them. Nothing sprang out at her. It was mainly marketing stuff from various companies he had dealt with.

  It was time to look around the rest of the office. She turned her attention to his filing cabinet next. It was one of those big, grey, metal ones with four drawers, just like you would find in the average office. She tried to open the top drawer, only to discover it was locked. So where might be the key? Would he keep it on him? She hoped not, otherwise she was going to have to try and break into it and it was made of pretty solid metal. Hopefully the key would be somewhere in the room.

  There was a drawer in his desk which she was pleased to discover was not locked. It was full of stationery and other assorted crap such as loose batteries, random cables, and half-eaten packets of sweets. There was also a small, old-fashioned toffee tin which she had seen him with before. She remembered that he used to keep his golf tees in it. She picked it up and shook it, making it rattle.