“It is a fine day, George of the Treadlaws,” John Barn says behind me. “I like to breathe, out here. I like to see the trees, and the sun, and the birds.”
He is following behind obedient, pale and careful, the stitches black in his paunch, the brace hanging off the silk-end. Step, step, step, he goes with his unaccustomed feet, on root and stone and ledge of earth, and he looks about when he can, at everything.
“You’re right, John.” I move on again so that he won’t catch up and be upset by the smell of me. “It’s a fine day for walking in the forest.”
The Silver Wind
Nina Allan
Shooter’s Hill had a rough reputation. The reforestation policy had returned the place to its original state, and the tract of woodland between Blackheath and Woolwich was now as dense and extensive as it had once been in the years and centuries before the first industrial revolution. The woods were rife with carjackers and highwaymen, and scarcely a week went by without reports of some new atrocity. The situation had become so serious that there were moves in parliament to reinstate the death penalty for highway robbery as it had already been reinstated for high treason. During the course of certain conversations I noticed that local people had taken to calling Oxleas Woods by its old name, the Hanging Wood, although no hangings had occurred there as yet. At least not officially.
There was still a regular bus service out to Shooter’s Hill, although I heard rumours that the drivers rostered on to it had to be paid danger money. I made up my mind to call on Owen Andrews in the afternoon; the evening curfew was strictly enforced in that part of London.
“How on earth do you manage, living alone out here?” I said to him. “Don’t you get nervous?”
He laughed, a deep inner rumbling that seemed to shake the whole of his tiny being. “I’ve lived here for most of my life,” he said. “Why should I leave?”
Owen Andrews was an achondroplasic dwarf, and as such he was subject to all the usual restrictions. He could not marry, he could not register children, although I supposed that this question was now academic, that he had been sterilised or even castrated once he had passed through puberty. Everyone had heard of such cases, and to knowingly pass on bad genes had been a custodial offence ever since Clive Billings’s British Nationalists came to power. There was a photograph on the mantelpiece in Andrews’s living room, a picture of Owen Andrews when he was young. The photograph showed him seated at a table playing cards with a pretty young woman. The woman was smiling, her fingers pressed to her parted lips. Andrews’s face was grave, his head bent in concentration over his cards. He had a handsome profile, and the camera had been angled in such a way as to conceal the most obvious aspects of his deformity. There was something about the picture that disturbed me, that hinted at some private tragedy, and I turned away from it quickly. I asked him again about the Shooter’s Hill Road and about the carjackers, but he insisted the whole thing had been exaggerated by the press.
“This place has always had a history to it, and history has a habit of repeating itself. If you don’t believe me read Samuel Pepys. People feared the Hill in his day too. You’ll find Mr Pepys particularly eloquent on the subject of what they used to do to the highwaymen.” He paused. “Those of them they caught up with, that is.”
I first learned about Owen Andrews through one of my clients. Lewis Usher had once been a rich man, but when the Americans abandoned Europe for China he lost everything more or less overnight. His wife was Zoe Clifford, the film actress. She died giving birth to their daughter, or from complications after the birth, I’m not sure which. The child was taken away by relatives of Zoe’s and Lewis Usher was left alone in an enormous rambling house at the top end of Crooms Hill, less than half a mile from the centre of Greenwich. The place would have been worth a fortune in the old days, but it was far too big for him, and after the crash he could no longer afford to maintain it. In spite of its poor condition it was the kind of property my agency specialised in and I was able to negotiate a very good price with an independent pharmaceuticals company. They were attracted by the council tax rates, which were still much lower on the south side of the Thames. The firm’s representative, a Hugo Greenlove, said they were planning to turn the house into a research facility. He rattled on excitedly, making exaggerated arm gestures to demonstrate how rooms might be divided and walls torn down, and although I thought it was tactless of Greenlove to talk that way in front of the house’s current owner Lewis Usher seemed completely unmoved. Once Greenlove had left he told me to get rid of the lot, not just the house itself but everything in it. He didn’t say as much but I had the impression he was planning to use the proceeds of the sale to get him to America. I imagined he had contacts there already.
“You really want to sell everything?” I said. In spite of my sympathy for Usher I was excited by the prospect. The house was stuffed with things I could move on for a handy profit, paintings and small bronzes and so on, and my files back at the office were stuffed with the names of people who would be happy to buy them.
“There are some things of Zoe’s I want, but that’s about it,” he said. There were framed photographs of his wife everywhere about the place, detailing the course of her career from stage to screen. She had been a tall, angular woman with a crooked mouth and a wide forehead but the pictures hinted at a deep sensuality and a striking emotional presence. Usher was still very much in mourning for her, and I think it was the fact that I was also a widower that made him trust me. He said I could have first refusal on anything I wanted from the house, and when I tentatively mentioned a few of the things that caught my fancy he named a price so low I felt filthy with guilt even as I agreed to it. Usher must have seen some of this in my expression because he thumped me hard on the shoulder and began to laugh.
“You’ll be doing me a favour,” he said. “It’s surprising how little you need, when you come right down to it.”
He laughed again, the laugh quickly turning into a painful-sounding cough that made me wonder if there was something more than grief that was consuming him. This could certainly account for his indifference to his material possessions. Yet when a couple of moments later I pointed to a small brass travelling clock and asked him how much he wanted for it his whole demeanour changed. An excited light came into his eyes and he looked ten years younger.
“That’s an Owen Andrews clock,” he said. “Or at least it’s supposed to be. I’ve never had it authenticated. I accepted it in lieu of a debt. I’ve had it for years.”
He looked down at the clock approvingly, his face registering the sort of pride that suggested that even if he had not made the clock himself it was people like him, people with money and influence, that made such things possible, and I glimpsed for a moment the man who for twenty years had been on the directorial board of a successful multinational company.
“Who is Owen Andrews?” I said. I knew little about clocks and their makers, just as I knew little of furniture or scrimshaw or glass. I had never counted myself as an antiques expert. I was an estate agent who indulged in a little antiques trading on the side. I counted my successes as luck, and the willingness to let myself be guided by instinct rather than knowledge.
“Owen Andrews is a dwarf,” Usher said. “He makes alchemical clocks. More popularly known as time machines.”
It was my turn to laugh, a trifle uneasily. “You’re not serious?” I said. “You don’t believe in that rubbish, surely?”
I had watched several TV documentaries on the subject of the new physics but I had never taken any of it very seriously. It was my wife Miranda that was interested. Miranda had been like that, fascinated by the unknown and always wanting to believe in the impossible. It was this openness to experience that had convinced her she could help her father, even when the doctors had warned that he might be dangerous. Her faith in the possibility of miracles was one of the things I loved most about her. I wondered if Usher was trying to set me up in some way, trying to make the clock seem more va
luable by spinning an elaborate yarn around it. Why he would do this when he seemed willing to more or less give away the other items I had specified I had no idea. I glanced at the clock again. Its case gleamed a dull ochre. It was only a small thing, and quite plain, but the more I looked at it the more I wanted to buy it. I had already made up my mind not to sell it on afterwards, that I would keep it for myself. But if Usher named some ridiculous price then the game was over.
Usher shrugged. “I think it’s all nonsense,” he said. “I happen to believe that time is like water pouring out of a tap, that once it’s been spilled there’s no calling it back again, not for love nor money nor any of these new-fangled gadgets. The man who gave me that clock offered it to me because he thought it was valuable but I accepted it because I liked it. I thought it was beautifully made.”
“But surely he can’t have believed it was a time machine? It looks like an ordinary carriage clock to me.”
Usher smiled. “How else would you describe a clock if not as a time machine?” He narrowed his eyes, locking them on mine for a moment as if challenging me to a duel then glanced off to one side, shaking his head. “But in the way you mean, no, it’s not a time machine. From what I gather it’s one of his ‘dry’ clocks, designed to tell the time and nothing more. It’s accurate of course and rather lovely but the case is brass, not gold, and in today’s market that makes it practically worthless. If you like it that much you can have it for nothing. The deal you just did on the house has solved a lot of problems. Call it a little extra bonus on top of your fee.”
My heart leapt. I had to concentrate hard to stop myself snatching the clock right off the shelf there and then, just so I could feel its weight in my hand.
“Is the maker still alive, this Owen Andrews?” I said instead.
“I have no idea,” said Usher. “I know nothing about him other than what I’ve told you.”
I think it was in that moment that I made my decision, that I would seek out Owen Andrews and discover the truth about him. I told myself that this was because the little brass clock had been the only thing to excite my interest since my wife died. There was more to it than that though. Somewhere deep inside me I was nursing the crazy hope that Owen Andrews was a man who could turn back time.
“Are you sure you want to get involved with this man, Martin?” Dora said. “He’s bound to be under surveillance.” She dragged on her cigarette, leaning to one side to knock the ash into the chipped Meissen saucer she kept permanently at her elbow for this purpose. I had long since given up going on at her about her smoking. Like Samsara perfume and the fake leopardskin coat she wore it was simply a part of her. She was wry and canny, with the kind of piercing, analytical intelligence that had sometimes caused me to wonder why she had left her job with the Home Office. The freelance legal work she did now earned her a steady and fairly comfortable income but it was hardly big money and only a fraction of what she was really worth. Once in the early days of our friendship, when for a brief while I imagined there might be the possibility of romance between us, I got drunk and asked her about it.
“I can’t work for those people any more,” she said. “I don’t believe in doing deals with the devil.” She laughed, a brisk ‘ha,’ then changed the subject. Later that same evening I found out she was married to a chap called Ray Levine, an ex-airline pilot who now grubbed around for work shuttling government ministers to and from their various conferences and crisis summits.
“Ray’s a bit of an arsehole, I suppose,” Dora said. “But we’ve known each other since we were kids. We used to smoke rollups together in the teachers’ toilets. That’s something you can’t replace. I don’t care what he does on those trips of his, just so long as he doesn’t bring it home with him. I learned a long time ago that trust is a lot more important than sexual fidelity.”
I first met Dora when I sold her her flat, a three-room conversion in Westcombe Park occupying part of what had once been a private nursing home. It was an attractive property, with high windows, a stained glass fanlight, and solid oak parquet flooring, but it had serious disadvantages, most crucially the access, which was via a fire escape belonging to the neighbouring property. I knew this could pose legal problems if she ever wanted to sell, and because I found myself liking her I broke all the usual rules of the business and told her so. The forthrightness of her reaction surprised me but as I came to know her better I realised it was typical of her.
“I can’t make a decision to buy something based on whether I might want to get rid of it later,” she said. “This is about a home, not a business investment. This is where I want to live.”
Then she smiled and told me she was a lawyer. She knew all about flying freehold and compromised access but she was adamant she wanted the flat, as she was adamant about a lot of things. After she moved in I took the liberty of contacting her and asking if she was interested in doing some freelance contract work. Within a year she was working two full days a week for me, clarifying the deadlocks and stalemates that occasionally threatened to upset some of our more lucrative sales. She had a genius for finding a loophole, or for finding anything, really. It was for this reason that I asked her if she could help me track down Owen Andrews. I didn’t go into any details and Dora being Dora didn’t ask questions. A couple of days later she called me at home and asked me if I could come round to her place.
“I’ve got things to show you,” she said. “But it’s not the kind of stuff I want to bring into the office.”
She opened the door to me dressed in a pair of Ray’s old camo pants held up with elastic braces. “Andrews is alive and well,” she said. “Would you like a drink?” She poured Glenlivet and wafted Samsara, the kind of luxury items that were often difficult to find on open sale but readily available if you had the right contacts and I supposed the whisky and the perfume came via Ray. Levine himself was rarely at the flat. Dora said he spent most of his nights on airbases or in the bed of whichever woman he was currently trying to impress.
“It’s like being married to your own younger brother,” she said. “But to be honest I think I’d kill him if he was here all the time.”
I occasionally wondered what would happen if I tried to spend the night with her. The prospect was tantalising, but in the end I suppose I valued our friendship, not to mention our business relationship, too highly to risk ruining it through some misconceived blunder. Also she had liked Miranda.
She handed me my drink then pushed a small stack of papers towards me across the table.
“Here,” she said. “Have a look at these.”
The papers comprised a mixture of photocopies and typed notes, with markings and annotations everywhere in Dora’s spiky black script. There were photocopies of a civil service entrance exam and a standard ID card, together with a passport-sized photograph and a copy of an article from a magazine I had never heard of called Purple Cloud. The photograph showed a swarthy, rather handsome man with a high forehead and heavy brows. It was just a head shot, and offered no clue to his stature, but his ID gave his height as 4’10”, with the note that between the ages of nine and fourteen he had undergone four major operations on his legs. His address was at Shooter’s Hill, just a couple of miles east of where we were sitting but its reputation for violence and the fact of the night-time curfew meant that in terms of current reality it was half a world away. In his civil service entrance test Andrews had scored ninety-eight percent.
“This is amazing,” I said. “Where did you get all this stuff?”
“There’s more,” Dora said. She pulled some papers from the stack and riffled quickly through them until she found what she wanted. “He worked for the MoD on classified projects. That means they could have wiped his whole ID if they’d wanted to, or altered it in some way, anything. The really weird thing is that he was dismissed from his post but left alone afterwards. That never happens. Normally they’d have you in prison, at least for a while, at least until the work you were doing was no longer re
levant. The fact that Andrews is still out there means he’s valuable to them in some way, or that he’s a spy. The very fact that he was working for them at all is some kind of miracle. He’s a dwarf, a non-person. It’s getting harder for people like him even to be granted a work permit.” She paused and stubbed out her cigarette. I caught the sweet reek of Marlboro tobacco. “The thing is, they’ll have their eye on him. If you go near him they’ll have their eye on you, too. Is that what you want? This isn’t a very good time to be getting yourself on somebody’s blacklist.”
“I just want to talk to him.”
“So you say. And I’ve read that article. What’s all this about, Martin?”
“It’s not about anything. I have a clock he made, that’s all. I was just curious.”
“Well, you know what they say about curiosity killing the cat.”
It should have been funny, but it wasn’t. We sat side by side at the table, neither of us saying anything. I wanted to reassure her in some way, to at least thank her for what she had done for me, but neither of these things seemed possible. I realised we were on new ground, the unstable territory that springs into being whenever the conversation between two people begins to trespass beyond its usual limits. Politics was something that didn’t get discussed much, not even in private.
“Can I take all these papers with me?” I said in the end.
“Please do. I don’t want them. I had to use my old passwords to get hold of some of that stuff. I’d be instantly traceable, if anyone had a mind to go looking. It’s a ridiculous risk to take. God knows what I was thinking.” She ran her hands through her hair, making it stand out about her head like a stiff black halo. “It was fun, though. It beat the shit out of verifying leasehold clauses.”
The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2012 Edition Page 49